by A. J. Banner
“You’re not fine,” he said, coming up to rest his hands on my shoulders. “I’m worried about you. Remember what happened back at our old place?”
“Yes, of course I do.” I slipped away from him, grabbed a roll of paper towels, and started wiping the countertop clean.
“You were out in the backyard,” he said, coming up behind me. “What if I hadn’t found you?”
“I would’ve woken up on my own.”
“Yeah, sometime after you’d gone out through the gate and wandered off.”
I’d come to my senses staring at the latch on the cedar-fence gate behind the Craftsman-style home we had so carefully remodeled in Seattle. “But I didn’t.”
“You could have. What about the time before that? When I caught you with the scissors?”
I clenched the paper towel, remembering how I’d woken to find I was holding a pair of sharp scissors in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. I’d looked at the gleaming blades in shock, gasped, and dropped the scissors on the desk. I’d been cutting up the medical report that I had discovered in his pocket the day before. I’d confronted him. We’d argued, gone to bed furious with each other. Before I slept, I’d made the decision to leave him.
He’d grown the beginning of a beard overnight. I’d forgotten how quickly his hair could grow. I’d called him my mountain man, also because of his height, six foot six, but he hadn’t been brawny back then. He’d stared at the strips of paper on his desk, his mouth open, and I’d jumped to my feet, nearly knocking over his office chair. I’d looked at my hands, somehow expecting to see them bloody and cut to pieces, too, but I was okay. He hadn’t yelled at me, hadn’t called me crazy. Instead, he had helped me gather up the strips of paper. “You need me,” he’d said gently. “I can take care of you when this happens. We can’t split up, don’t you see?”
Soon after that incident, I’d filed for divorce. We had already been falling apart, piece by piece. His lie had been the final straw. “I’m stressed, that’s all,” I’d said. But in the back of my mind, I’d worried about what I might be capable of doing in my sleep.
Now here I was, and here he was again, witnessing my craziness. “You need someone to watch over you,” he said gently. “Where is your husband now?” He glanced back in the direction of the house.
“He’s not here,” I said, and maybe he could tell, by the look on my face, that he shouldn’t ask any more questions.
“I’ll help you clean up then,” he said.
“You don’t need to—”
“I have a few minutes.”
As I rearranged the displays, Brandon swept the floor, and it was almost as though we were a couple again—the synergy between us fell back into place. But I knew it was an illusion, that the cooperation inevitably turned sour.
In the prep room, he propped the broom against the wall and crouched down, reaching beneath a cabinet of drawers. I lost sight of him, and then he pulled out something rectangular and flat, a clothbound journal, weathered and worn, the painted pattern on the cover a decoupage garden of lilies and leaves and butterflies.
“Look what I found,” he said, coming to me. “Is this yours?”
“No,” I said. “It was under the cabinet?”
“Must’ve fallen from up there,” he said, nodding toward the journals on the shelf.
“It must be my mother’s.” I took the journal from him, opened the front cover. The cursive inside was familiar and unmistakable. It was my mother’s journal, and by the dates she had scrawled inside, I could tell it was her most recent one, the last journal in which she had written before her death. But it was different from the others. On the first page she had written, perhaps as a note to herself: Keep hidden.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I rushed Brandon off, making a quick excuse. After he drove away, I took the diary into the main house, straight into the large library, and sat at my mother’s desk, the mottled light filtering in, the garden in motion outside. She had spent many days sitting here, paying bills or poring over the reference books that packed her shelves. I imagined her writing in this delicate cloth journal.
Her words still breathed, her elegant handwriting dancing across the page. Why had she wanted this book hidden? Inside, she had drawn intricate pictures of common herbs—white willow bark, capsaicin, calendula. She had drawn feverfew, had noted below the picture, For migraines. And beneath a sketch of lemon balm, she had written curly-edged, mintlike leaves a staple ingredient in my facials and tinctures.
She had also sketched castor beans, the deadliest poison on Earth if the ricin is not extracted. A single bean could kill an adult within five minutes. My mother had used the seeds without the hull for medicinal tinctures.
Her writings became gradually sparser, more disjointed, blank pages between entries.
The spider weaves a speedy web, or should I call it an octopus-like alien, its tentacles reaching through my brain.
I swallowed, the room closing in. She was writing about her tumor. More blank pages, then:
The headaches plague me. When I awaken, my body aches. My fingers are stiff. Soon, I won’t be able to write much. The words drop from my mind and wither away.
She had put on such a brave face when I’d visited. Had told me not to worry.
Elise feels so hopeless after the divorce. I can’t bear to tell her that her Brandon has been here, fixing the faulty light switches, the door hinges, the plumbing leak beneath the kitchen sink. Talking to him is a comfort. I can’t burden her. But I have decisions to make.
What decisions? About her estate? Her treatment? About my ex-husband?
Dr. Lund is attentive and knowledgeable.
An entry about Kieran, but then nothing more about him as she wrote on about difficult customers who demanded easy solutions or wanted deep discounts for remedies. More blank pages.
And then:
Dr. L is dating Elise. I only hope his intentions are good. He seems like a man who keeps secrets.
She didn’t know how right she had been.
Another blank page, and then:
Shouldn’t have told Dr. Lund about the Juliet, should not have confessed . . .
What had she meant? Confessed to what? I couldn’t make sense of her words. Her handwriting had devolved over time, her writing messier, choppy in her last days, her thoughts breaking apart.
On the second-to-last page, below an illegible entry, my mother had written:
I must warn Elise about Dr. L . . .
I nearly dropped the journal. My hands shook. My throat went dry. The library seemed to whisper behind my back, the books conspiring against me.
Another blank page, and then:
If I die now, it was not an accident. It was Dr. L. He will use the Juliet.
I read the phrases again and again. She must have been delusional. The tumor must have taken control of her brain, making her paranoid.
Dr. L could have been another doctor. No, she had meant Kieran. Dr. Lund.
I thought she had still been in possession of her faculties when I’d spoken to her on the phone, and she had told me not to worry. But her messy writing suggested all reason had begun to leave her.
If I die now, it was not an accident.
It was Dr. L.
I flipped back through her notes. Some earlier entries bled into a blur. The letters faded at their edges. My mother had suffered from headaches, difficulty writing—that much was clear. Difficulty thinking straight. I’d begun to detect subtle changes over the phone, in her periods of silence, her quick shift from one subject to another, but I had dismissed the signs. Occasional listlessness, bouts of anger. I’d been in denial, not wanting to believe my mother was dying.
I had already accompanied her to surgery, chemo, radiation treatments. She’d been so exhausted afterward. I’d deluded myself into believing she could be cured, but even then, I’d known that wasn’t possible. She had been buying precious time, that was all. How much more time would she have had if she
had started the clinical trial?
The journal must’ve been on the shelf with the other ones, hiding in plain sight. I had flipped through a couple of the journals, but my grief had been too raw. I still dropped into a chasm of sorrow when I saw her handwriting, but I should’ve paid more attention.
I never expected her to accuse anyone of murder, least of all her doctor. When she had crumpled in the garden, suffering from a stroke, he had signed off on her death certificate—but what if she had not died of a stroke at all?
A shiver ran through me, my eyes watering. A breeze rustled through the trees, disturbing the plants on the library windowsill. The leaves of the devil’s ivy fluttered—they were almost impossible to kill. Unlike fragile human beings. Unlike my mother.
He will use the Juliet.
The Juliet could kill, she said. She warned me not to touch it, said it had already killed someone. But whom? Had she told Kieran that she knew the herb could kill? Maybe she’d had the idea in her mind that he might kill her somehow, and her focus on the Juliet plant had been the delusional part of her thinking. If he’d planned to kill her, why wouldn’t he have used an established drug? He was a doctor. He had any manner of pharmaceuticals at his disposal.
I looped back to the possibility that she had been delusional. But if not, I couldn’t prove that he had wanted to kill her or, in the extreme case, that he had done so. I did not even have her cremated remains.
But the prospect that she might have met with foul play made me hyperventilate. Kieran had made house calls to check on her, even after she’d started seeing her oncologist for treatments in the city. He could have opened her mail. Perhaps he had grown impatient waiting for her to die, and he’d sped up the process.
No, never. What horrible thoughts. How could he have been sure that I would marry him? Arrogance? An overblown sense of his own abilities and importance? He did get what he wanted, almost always, it seemed. In the event of my death, he would inherit all of my assets, including the house and gardens, which I owned outright.
If Kieran wanted to kill me, he would try to make it look natural. Or like an accident—but no, what was I even thinking? I had only a few words in my mother’s journal about a plant in the garden and her irrational fear that Kieran wanted to kill her with it.
I flipped through the pages again. She had tucked a folded, fragile slip of paper into the back pocket of the journal. It was a page from an earlier journal, with the notation Book #12 in the top-right corner. Her writing, in black marker, had bled in a few places. She had drawn a picture of an herb with jagged leaves and narrow stems resembling lovage, but with the spindly look of chervil, similar to cilantro. She labeled the herb Juliet. It was a beautiful likeness of the herb in the garden.
She had written Slumber and, below the word, several recipes with notes. So the Slumber powder had contained the Juliet. I’d read her formulas before, so I understood the meanings of the words: marc, which referred to the solid matter in the formula; menstruum, or liquid, in this case alcohol and water; and precipitate, the residue that settled to the bottom. The recipes changed, some numbers crossed out, ingredients added or subtracted. Sometimes she included lavender, chamomile, or licorice, hibiscus, passionflower.
Formulas for Slumber, including the crushed Juliet plant. At the bottom of the page, she had scrawled the name C. Farrell, and then her writing appeared to have continued on another page.
I went to the cottage to look through the cloth journals on the shelf, numbered on their spines, and pulled down Book #12. Flipped through the brittle pages. This journal was dated nearly seventeen years earlier, after I’d left for college. The book was fragile, coming apart at the spine, but I found the jagged edge of the missing page. On the page that came after, on the line following the words C. Farrell, she had written “one bottle” for “one-time use.” And then:
First time, not enough. Adjust dosage. Pandora’s box in the wrong dose . . . deceptive. . . like Romeo and Juliet. Untraceable.
Romeo and Juliet? What had she meant? Untraceable. Did this mean the plant was not traceable in the human system, and how would she know? She had traveled to gardens around the world, had smuggled cuttings and seeds back in her luggage. Sometimes she didn’t know exactly what she had brought home.
I knew this much—that my husband needed my money, that he had cheated on me. That he had lied. That my mother had feared him, that she had thought he would use the Juliet plant to kill her. That he and Diane had spoken cryptically, in a way that I could easily interpret as a plan to kill me as well.
I looked at my mother smiling at me from her photograph, but now she seemed sad, or worried, her gaze imploring me to do something, but what?
My attorney had not yet called back. I wished he would hurry. Maybe it was time to go into town to talk to the police. I had known a local deputy, John Russell, in high school. These days, I said hello when I saw him in town or on patrol. He had known my mother, had attended her funeral. I zipped the journal in my purse, locked up the house and cottage, and floored the Honda all the way down to the precinct.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The police station was in a bungalow with a metal roof, the words SAN JUAN COUNTY SHERIFF, CHINOOK ISLAND STATION printed on the side of the building. An American flag flapped on a tall metal pole by the front door. Two dark-green patrol cars, with the block letters SHERIFF painted on the back, were parked in the lot.
I pulled into a visitor spot and went inside, jumpy and nervous. Did I really want to involve the police? John Russell and I had known each other a long time ago, before he’d left for the police academy and then to work patrol on the streets of Reno. He’d returned to the island a few years earlier, or so my mother had told me. How well did he remember me?
In the reception area, there was nobody behind the desk, but I heard laughter in a back room. I rang the bell at the counter, and the laughter ceased. The smell of pine cleanser hung in the air. I waited, my heartbeat fast. A uniformed officer came out, pulling up his belt, and grinned at me. I’d never seen him before.
“Help you, ma’am?” He was tall, his name tag reading OFFICER WILEY.
“I’m here to talk to Deputy Russell,” I said in a shaky voice. “Does he still work here?”
“He still does,” John Russell said, coming up behind the other officer.
Officer Wiley nodded at me and headed out the front door.
John’s bushy brows rose. “Elise, good to see you!” Since I’d run into him a few months earlier, he’d put on a few pounds. He wore a button-down blue shirt, open at the top, a stain on the front, a clip-on tie clinging to one side of his collar. I smiled at him, at his gray, concerned eyes, the prominent nose with a bump in the middle.
“I need to talk to you off the record, if possible,” I said as he shook my hand. His fingers felt slightly sticky.
He ushered me into a conference room that smelled of stale coffee. A watercooler, fridge, and counter took up one wall, a dry-erase board on the opposite wall. A tinted bay window overlooked the front garden and the sidewalk. He pulled out a chair for me.
“Coffee, tea? We might have soda—”
“I’m good, thanks,” I said, sitting at the table. He poured himself a cup of coffee from a pot on a burner and sat across from me. I noticed two stains on his shirt.
“How can I help you?” he said. “You look . . . worried.”
“It has been a bad couple of days.” I wiped my cheeks, aware suddenly of how unkempt I must look. “I imagine you’re busy. I won’t take much of your time.”
“We’ve got four deputies now, so my stress level is easing up. I get exciting calls, though. Just checked on a dog that was supposedly hit by a car. Turned out he was fine, sunning himself in the driveway. What’s going on with you?”
I couldn’t help but smile a little. “I need some advice about my husband.”
“Dr. Lund? Is he okay?”
“I’m not sure. I think he might be trying to . . .” I lowered my
voice, glanced toward the open doorway. I looked back at John. “He’s having an affair. I caught them together. And it turns out he has a lot of debt. But that’s not why I’m here.”
“Whoa, I’m sorry, Elise,” John said, gulping his coffee.
I took the journal out of my purse and slid it across the table. “And then there’s this. My mother’s journal. Her last one before she died.”
“Should I be writing up a report?” John said, sitting back, lifting his hands in the air. “The minute I look at this, I’ll need to file a report.”
“You can’t just . . . talk to me?”
He slid the journal back toward me. “Go ahead and tell me what’s on your mind.”
I tucked the journal back into my purse. “She says her doctor would be the one to kill her, if she were to die ‘now.’ She wrote ‘now,’ meaning before her time. I found evidence in Kieran’s laptop that she was accepted into a clinical trial that might have extended her life, but she never entered the trial. And he didn’t even mention that she was going to try.”
John frowned, ran the flat of his hand up over his forehead. “Have you spoken to him about this? Asked him about the trial?”
“He would deny everything. I just think he might’ve done something to her. To my mother. But I don’t know.”
“Your mom—didn’t she have a stroke? She also had cancer. I knew that.”
“Yes,” I said, growing more frustrated, “but . . .”
He leaned forward, clasped his hands on the table. “Are you saying you think your husband, her doctor, might have killed her?”
“No, I don’t know—I think this all might’ve been his plan to marry me for my money,” I said, realizing how crazy I sounded.
His frown deepened, a furrow appearing on his forehead. “Do you have any proof of this? How do you know?”
“I overheard him talking to his lover, and it seemed like they were talking about getting rid of me. She said she wanted me gone already, and he told her to be patient and to learn to play the long game.”
