The Poison Garden

by A. J. Banner

  The wind ruffled his hair. His skin was pale, his lips slightly parted, bluish. I thought he must’ve stumbled down the porch steps, tripped, and fallen, but he would’ve tumbled forward—he must have rolled onto his back after hitting the ground. He might have hit his head and passed out, but there was no blood, no obvious bruising. No sign of trauma. He appeared to be lying peacefully on the grass, showing no obvious sign of whoever—or whatever—had done this to him.

  I was shouting for help now, my voice disappearing into the wind. We were too far from everything. Nobody would come to help. Chantal couldn’t hear me from this distance, and the house on the corner was empty. I was alone.

  I placed my ear to his lips, no hint of breath. He looked as if he would turn his head and laugh at me, but he did not move.

  “Kieran,” I shouted again. “Talk to me!”

  No reaction.

  Time slowed, the leaves fluttering, a hawk arcing over us in the sky. Smells rushed in—moss, grass, lavender. Mint, rosemary, the distant dankness of the sea. And noises—a foghorn, a rustling, a cawing.

  I lifted his arm. It was heavy, as if made of stone. I let go, and his arm dropped, deadweight. I felt his wrist again for a pulse, nothing. I kept shouting for help, my voice growing hoarse.

  CPR. I’d learned in a class. Create a V shape on his chest. Put your weight into it. Fast compressions. I threw all my strength into pushing on his chest, trying to pump the life back into him. “Come on, breathe!” There was no response, no gasp from him, no air intake.

  I’d imagined slipping the Juliet powder into his drink, watching him die. But I could not possibly have actually done it. Something else had happened to him while I’d slept upstairs, unaware that he was dying in the garden below my window.

  I kept pumping, compressing, shouting, tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. His lips were cool, rubbery. No response. I got up, stumbled backward, stars bursting in my vision. I bent forward, head down between my legs, and the blood returned to my head. The stars disappeared.

  I straightened and ran into the house, grabbed my cell phone from my purse, raced out into the garden toward the cottage, searching for a signal, wishing I’d had the landline fixed.

  The horizon tilted, and I stumbled. The garden wavered and blurred. Nausea rose in my throat, weakness washing through me. I doubled over. My limbs grew heavy. No, not now. Not again. The trees swayed, bending away from the wind. Heavy, so heavy—I needed to dial 9-1-1. Press. The buttons. The phone flew away in slow motion. I reached for it, falling. My legs crumpled, the ground rushing upward, and then darkness closed around me.

  In a twilight world of jagged images, Kieran threw his head back and laughed. Diane clutched the comforter to her chest, jumped out of our bed. You’re gone already. Gone. I struggled to open my eyes, squinted in the sudden light. Pushed myself up to a sitting position. Cold air rippled across my skin; my teeth chattered. My forehead hurt just above my right eye. I touched my temple, winced in pain, felt a lump. My fingers came away sticky with blood. I must’ve fainted again and hit my head. On what? There—blood on the corner of the stone garden bench.

  The baby. My hand flew to my abdomen. I was clothed, intact, no cramping. That was good. It didn’t seem that I’d fallen on my belly. I’d woken lying on my side. No pain in my body, only in my head.

  What was I doing here, sitting in the dirt? The sun strained upward through the trees. Dried leaves and bits of soil clung to my pajamas. Confusion clouded my thoughts. My left slipper had come off. The right one was still on my foot. This wasn’t a dream. I had been outside all this time. I was awake. Where was my phone? I’d had it with me, or I thought I had. On my hands and knees, I checked the ground nearby, found my phone beneath a lavender bush. Only 10 percent of the battery was left, no signal.

  I tucked the phone into my pocket, retrieved my errant slipper and put it on. Don’t stand up too fast. My legs wobbled, but I was okay, shivering but conscious, lucid.

  Kieran had been lying nearby. Now only the garden rippled away from me, the barberry bushes bursting into autumn reds and yellows. A Steller’s jay screeched in the hazelnut branches. Kieran wasn’t here, but I was sure he had been lying motionless, his skin bleached like driftwood.

  A terrible fear tore through me. I staggered to the spot where I’d seen him, dropped to my hands and knees, ran my hands along the ground. This was exactly where he had been sprawled out near the steps. Where was he now? Had he walked away? But he hadn’t been breathing. I hadn’t been able to revive him.

  A garden beetle scuttled off, hiding in the lavender. The orb weaver spiders spun their durable webs in dewy patterns, the multicolored bodies bracing to trap insects and wrap them in silk. Life in the garden went on as before.

  “Kieran! Kieran!” I called again, my voice echoing. The surf rushed in the distance, another foghorn blowing at sea.

  How long had I been out? The blank spot, the blackness—I had no idea. Had Kieran been here, or had he been a particularly vivid dream?

  I remembered his half-closed eyes, the cold air stealing his body heat. No breath. He had been here. I knew it.

  I followed the path back through the rhododendrons, the rosebushes, the shade garden to the shallow reflecting pond. I checked beneath every shrub. He was not in the garden anywhere. I kept calling for him. No answer, my voice echoing back at me.

  As I climbed the steps to the gazebo, fragments of our wedding ceremony returned to my mind. Kieran gazing down at me with love in his eyes, or what I had interpreted as love. In the distance, Chantal’s house was barely visible through the trees. She would not have seen anything from that far away.

  There were no footprints in the soil around the gazebo, no broken branches, not a scrap of clothing left behind. An errant bee buzzed by, and a large spiderweb strung between two branches trembled in the breeze.

  In the herb patch, one of the Juliet plants had disappeared, a hole in the ground, disturbed soil where the roots had been. I must have come outside and pulled out the plant. Or somebody had.

  If I’d actually seen him, his Jaguar would be here. I dashed back through the garden, past the buffer of trees toward the driveway. His car was parked next to mine. The doors were locked. Cupping my hands against the window, I could see the empty seats and console, a packet of tissues on the dashboard. I’d hoped to find him curled up inside, but he had driven here, which meant he was still here. I couldn’t have imagined him. I remembered every vivid detail of him while he’d lain in the garden.

  I dashed back into the house, the kitchen door banging, yelling for him. My voice sounded unnatural, far away. The refrigerator and stovetop gleamed. Morning sun lit the walls in washed-out pink, the color of diluted blood. The coffee mugs were gone, the countertop wiped clean. Had I dreamed they were there? Or had I washed them? The coffeepot was empty. The clock read 7:45.

  I must’ve been out cold for fifteen minutes to half an hour at most. I didn’t know for sure. I couldn’t remember how much time I had spent trying to revive Kieran or what time I had gone outside. I’d seen the mugs on the countertop; I knew I had.

  “Kieran! Are you here?” My voice echoed through the downstairs rooms—the library, the study alcove, the living room, the dining room. No sign of him anywhere. The antique wall clock in the library ticked too loudly, tapping at my eardrums.

  Upstairs, he was not in the master bedroom. Gooseflesh rose on my arms. Electricity buzzed in the air. Nobody was here. What had I done? I no longer knew myself. I did not know what I was capable of in my sleep. But I’d done nothing! Kieran wasn’t where I’d seen him.

  He wasn’t in any of the upstairs rooms. I ran back down the hall to the landing. Grabbed the banister. My voice bounced down the stairs. Kieran, Kieran. No response. The house held its breath, as quiet and still as a memory.

  Back down in the foyer, I flung open the front door, cold, salty air wafting in. A magnolia tree, dropping its leaves, seemed to struggle to remain upright, weighted by its own wide
spread limbs. I retreated into the house, shivering. I had tracked dirt all over the floor, soil and grass on my slippers.

  If I were to report Kieran missing, what would I say? That I had tripped over his lifeless body, and then he had disappeared? I’d like to report that I dreamed of a dead man. I tottered down the hall to the guest bathroom. My ghostlike reflection in the mirror startled me. The whites of my eyes shone. My hair stuck up, my face pale and shadowy. A gash above my right eyebrow still oozed a little blood, but a scab was forming. I washed the wound with hot water, then cleaned it with alcohol swabs from the first aid kit beneath the sink. The stone corner of the bench had done a number on my head. But my vision was not blurry, and my thoughts were clearing.

  What if Kieran wasn’t dead at all but playing a game, trying to drive me crazy? If so, he’d pulled off an elaborate, convincing ruse. All evidence had disappeared—his body, the coffee mugs. Otherwise I had been dreaming. Or suffering from delusions.

  Or I had a brain tumor.

  The thought stopped me in my tracks. The sleepwalking. Lucid dreams, and now possible hallucinations. But Kieran had assured me that the type of tumor my mother had was not heritable, most of the time. Most of the time. He could have lied. Were the cancer cells eating through my brain even now? How would I know? Maybe that was what he wanted, for me to die of a tumor. Then he could not be blamed for my death. Perhaps he didn’t even care about the baby.

  No, impossible—I’d seen him. I knew I had. My heart pounded; my head spun. He wasn’t in the house, which meant he had to be outside. I found his bicycle leaning against the house beneath the eaves, where he usually left it.

  Halfway down the driveway, my phone caught one bar of reception. I hit speed dial for Kieran’s cell phone. The call went straight to voice mail. His deep voice startled me, alive and casual, telling me to leave a message at the beep.

  “Stop playing games and answer your phone,” I said and hung up. I thought of dialing the number for the clinic, but it was Sunday. The clinic was closed.

  Where could he have gone?

  The cottage. I hadn’t checked there. I thought I should’ve asked Brandon to change the locks to the shop, too. I’d been careful to lock the door the night before, but what if? I rushed out onto the garden path. The shop door was unlocked and swung open a bit stiffly, the hinges squeaking. Someone had tracked dirt on the welcome mat.

  The wet dirt crossed the white tile floor, past the glass jars of herbs behind the counter, into the prep room. There, on the wood-block table, a small weight sat on one side of the metal scale, a paper bag of Slumber powder on the other, labeled in my mother’s artistic cursive, the ends of the letters curling upward like a vine.

  Next to the scale was a wooden bowl containing mixed dried herbs, including bits of the red Juliet flower like splashes of blood. In a white marble mortar and pestle, herbs had been crushed into a powder.

  Black ink spread through my mind, blotting out my memory. Combining the herbs, crushing them into powder, preparing a tincture—had I done this?

  I picked up the bag of Slumber powder from the scale, and the other side rose up an inch. I removed the metal weight from the tray, and the two trays evened out. I sniffed the Slumber powder, the spicy, earthy smell conjuring a memory of my mother. Don’t ever touch this plant, she’d said, yanking out the Juliet, which had reappeared and regrown countless times. Untraceable.

  I pulled on vinyl gloves and placed the remaining herb mixture into a plastic bag. My mother had done the same thing so many times, her nimble fingers tucking the dried leaves away in a sample drawer. Lifting the paper bag of Slumber powder and pouring just the right amount through a funnel into a tincture bottle.

  I thought of what my mother had written, that the herb had killed a man. Maybe I had given Kieran the Slumber powder, and he’d fallen into a deep sleep. But he had woken, perhaps disoriented, and had wandered off in confusion. Yes, this is what happened. My shoulders relaxed. He was alive. There was no other explanation.

  I cleaned up the prep room as quickly as I could, wiped the floor, took the Slumber powder into the house, and hid it in the kitchen cabinet behind the bags of coffee and tea. I thought I should dispose of it completely, but a voice in my head told me to keep it, just in case. Of what? In case Kieran stormed back home in a rage?

  I got dressed quickly, covered my head wound with a bandage. Got into my car and drove to Chantal’s place. Her Kia was gone. No sign of anyone on the property. If Kieran had taken off, confused, where could he have gone? He could be afraid of me, or at least angry, if I poisoned him. If I did something that I didn’t remember.

  I drove down through the hills and valleys into town, watching for Kieran all the way, expecting to see him staggering along the shoulder or lying in a ditch. The forests and meadows sped by faster and faster. I took my foot off the gas. Let up, breathe. He could have returned to the farmhouse—but without his car? Or found his way down to the yacht. The two other places that belonged to him, possible refuges. He had to be somewhere.

  At the harbor, I parked at the curb and walked out onto the floating dock, past a fisherman derigging his boat and a tanned woman washing her catamaran. A seagull perched on a nearby railing, watching me, one stray feather sticking out. Clouds rolled overhead, casting patterns of light and shadow. Bittersweet memories came to me, of Kieran and me gliding on the calm sea as he pointed out the hills on nearby Orcas Island, a harbor seal playing in the shallows.

  His yacht was tied to its slip far out in the marina, away from the other slips that extended like fingers from the floating docks. There it was, Knot on Call painted in blue along the side.

  His dinghy was gone. Normally the rubber craft was tied alongside the yacht. The dinghy was similar to the sturdy vessels that special forces teams used to conduct clandestine missions, gliding ashore in the night. Durable and stable, it was Kieran’s tender of choice when he moored his boat offshore and rowed into a shallow harbor.

  Had he somehow made it here and taken out the dinghy, or had it somehow become untied from the boat? I climbed the ladder onto the yacht. The deck was damp, but that was not unusual. We’d had intermittent rains. I couldn’t tell if anyone had been here recently.

  I knocked on the cabin door. No answer. No sign of anyone. I used my key to let myself in, ducking my head as I descended the stairs. The bed was made, the galley kitchen clean. The boat rocked and swayed on its mooring lines. I began to feel a little nauseated again.

  I left the cabin, locked the door. Up on deck, I shielded my eyes and gazed out between the jetties toward the sea. The harbor was protected, but the tide was still going out. However he’d managed to get here, Kieran could’ve ridden the outgoing tide at its height, rowed off somewhere. But where? And why?

  As I walked back along the dock, I passed a man preparing to launch his skiff. “Did you see a rubber dinghy leave here?” I asked. “From that yacht out there on the last slip?”

  He straightened up and frowned. “I thought I saw someone head out that way,” he said. “But I don’t remember anything about a dinghy.”

  “Did you recognize the person?” I said.

  “Can’t say I was paying much attention. A man.”

  “Tall, short?”

  He shrugged. “Like I said, I can’t say. Regular.”

  “Thank you.” I headed back to my car. If Kieran had come here, why hadn’t he taken out the yacht? Why the dinghy? And there remained the stubborn problem of how he’d come here. Not in his Jaguar. Possibly in Diane’s Prius.

  Diane.

  She must’ve picked him up. He had to be with her, or if he wasn’t, she had to know where he was going.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Kieran had mentioned that Diane had moved to the island to help her dad recover from heart surgery. But I had no idea where he lived or whether or not she was still there.

  I swung by the farmhouse—no car in the driveway, no obvious sign of life. I thought of running back home to pick up
my laptop, but the library was open for a few hours on Sunday and had its own public computers. It was housed in an old brick-and-wood Victorian at the edge of town. Inside, the rooms smelled of sweat and mildly of mold from recent flood damage. A few locals milled about, browsing the aisles or ensconced at workstations.

  Seated at one of the computers, I logged in and searched the internet for Diane Jasper’s address. I found several Diane Jaspers in many states, of many ages. When I narrowed the search to Washington State, I found Diane Jaspers in Everett and Cle Elum, but those Diane Jaspers were in their sixties. Kieran’s Diane Jasper had to be in her twenties. The addresses then jumped to California, Nevada, Minnesota, Maryland.

  A man sat at the computer next to me. I hunched forward at the screen, glanced up toward the checkout desk. The librarian, a young woman I did not recognize, smiled in my direction. I smiled back and returned to the screen, my heart pounding. I revised my search, looking for any person with the surname Jasper on Chinook Island. I found Frederick Jasper, age sixty-three—he had to be her father—on Kingfisher Lane, about eight blocks away.

  Up at the house, I parked at the curb. The yard was overgrown, falling into neglect, but it appeared that it had once been well tended—a rose garden in the front beds, an apple orchard on one side of the house. The modern, boxy two-story house was set back from the road, painted in a rich, dark shade of mahogany. A white Prius was parked in the driveway.

  I walked to the front step, on which a welcome mat read, HOWDY, STRANGER! I knocked on the door, my heart in my throat, expecting Diane to answer.

  The man who opened the door, wheezing, appeared to have risen from the dead. His skin was ashen, and he coughed as he squinted down at me through the screen. He was handsome beneath the pallor, his mop of black hair surprisingly thick, combed back. Like a vampire, I thought. His aquiline features echoed Diane’s.

  “May I help you?” he said in a phlegmy voice. “If you’re selling something, I don’t want it. I don’t buy Girl Scout cookies, and I’ve already found the Lord.”