Nightshade for Warning

by Bailey Cattrell

  I vaguely recognized the woman who stood behind the computer terminal, but couldn’t place her. Her pretty brown eyes flicked around the lobby, pausing for a moment here and there before moving on. Stony displeasure radiated from her heart-shaped face. Then her jaw came up in determination as she gathered her long dark hair into a ponytail and twisted it into a quick bun that she secured with a ballpoint pen off the counter.

  “What’s going on?” I asked again, eyeing her name tag. It read FELICITY DONOVAN and under that: MANAGER. Where did I know that name from?

  She spared a glance at Astrid and did a double take when she saw Precious. She opened her mouth as if to comment but must have decided against it. Instead, she trained her gaze on me. “Are you a guest?”

  “No. I own Scents and Nonsense here in Poppyville. My brother is staying here, though.”

  Her face cleared. “Right. You’re Ellie Allbright.”

  “Um, yeah.” I racked my brain, trying to remember. Was she a customer? Then I had it. Felicity Donovan had been the editor of the Poppyville Picayune for several years. I hadn’t noticed when the name changed on the masthead, but she must not be working there now. But managing the Hotel California? I mentally shrugged. Maybe it paid better.

  “Felicity knows everyone in town,” Astrid said.

  The manager’s expression softened at my friend’s words. “I do pay attention to what’s going on. Hard not to after so many years of it being a job requirement.” Now she pointed at the pig and raised her eyebrows. “I heard Mrs. Paulson got one of those.”

  Astrid smiled and looked down at Precious, who had settled into the curve of her shoulder. “Yep. She’s boarding at Doc Ericcson’s.” Then she waved her hand to indicate the activity behind us and casually asked, “So, what’s all this?”

  “A man was found dead in his room this morning.”

  “Dead?” The panic I’d felt when I saw the ambulance rose higher in my throat. “Who?”

  She shrugged.

  “You must know,” I pushed.

  Her lips thinned.

  “How did he die?” Astrid asked in a hushed tone.

  “Don’t know.” Felicity’s rueful expression betrayed her frustration with being kept out of the loop. “But the cops are making a pretty big deal about it.”

  My eyes searched the lobby for my brother again. “I said I’d call him after the interview,” I whispered. “He never texted back.”

  “Hmm?” Astrid was stroking Precious, whose beady porcine eyes blinked with pleasure.

  “Colby,” I said.

  Her head came up. “Oh, now. You don’t think . . .”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It’s not your brother,” Felicity said.

  So she did know who had died.

  “Hey, sis.” Colby’s voice cut through my agitation as he strode toward me from the direction of the stairs.

  Relief whooshed through me, and I ran to give him a hug. “You’re okay!” Still, I could feel worry coming off of him in waves.

  “I’m fine.” He grimaced. “But Blake Sontag’s not.”

  I backed away, feeling the blood drain from my face in a strange combination of relief and horror. “That’s who . . . ?”

  He nodded. “A housekeeper found him a couple of hours ago.”

  Behind him the elevator doors opened. Two men guided a gurney into the lobby. It held a large, lumpy black bag. I gasped as I realized what had to be inside.

  “Oh, now, come on,” Felicity protested, hurrying out from behind the reception desk. “There’s a service entrance you can use for that.”

  “Sorry, lady,” one of the men said, even though I could see through the open elevator doors that there was another set of doors on the opposite side that must open into the hotel’s service areas.

  Helplessly, the hotel manager looked on as they wheeled Blake Sontag’s encased body through the crowded lobby to the front entrance and down the wheelchair ramp to the waiting ambulance.

  A part of me couldn’t believe he was inside the bag, and another part was unreasonably glad that I didn’t have to look at him. I still had disturbing dreams as a result of finding Josie Overland’s dead body months before.

  And yet another part of me felt like I’d been waiting for something like this to happen ever since then. My grandmother’s voice rose in my mind, unbidden but clear as a bell. She’d been talking to my mother shortly before Mama died, a conversation I shouldn’t have been able to remember at all, considering I’d been only three years old at the time.

  We all help keep the balance, whatever our gifts . . . Your daughter will bring solace to others, but also right wrongs . . . and that will be triggered by violence.

  She’d been talking about me. The original violence that sparked the memory had been Josie’s murder. Now Blake Sontag was dead. Was this the beginning of a trend? The thought made me shudder.

  Felicity, Astrid, Colby, and I stood in a row at the window as the men loaded the body bag into the back of the ambulance and folded the gurney for storage. Nearby, guests murmured, and I could feel their horror and curiosity buffeting my psyche.

  Wait a minute.

  “Colby, how did you know it was Blake who died?”

  The hotel manager turned her head to look at him in a way that told me she hadn’t shared that morsel of information.

  Colby pressed his lips together and nodded toward the Horseshoe Bar on the other side of the lobby from the Empire Room, where we’d eaten the night before.

  I took a few steps and peered into the low light. Detective Max Lang was sitting in one of the booths. Tall and rugged, he held himself with an imposing rigidity that implied a military background he didn’t actually have, and his gray eyes were narrowed beneath his straw-colored buzz cut.

  Larken sat across from him, her face pale and eyes puffy from tears.

  • • •

  WHEN I was four, my mother died in an accident. Her mother, my gamma, was already living with us, and took over mothering me as my father grieved. Three years later, he met Wynn Stubbs—Winifred, really, but she disliked the name and said the diminutive “Winnie” made her sound either like a horse or a honey-loving bear—and they’d married a year after that. Ten months later Colby was born, and eighteen months after that my half sister Darcy had entered the world.

  So I’d been an only child for nine years, and then suddenly I wasn’t. I’ve heard of similar situations where the older sibling was unhappy about the change of events, but that wasn’t me. Like all onlies, I was good at entertaining myself for long stretches of time, but it was often a lonely childhood. When Dad told me I’d be getting a little brother, I was beyond excited. Those long months had felt like waiting for Christmas, and when Colby was finally born it was like getting the best gift ever.

  It didn’t hurt that he was a pretty baby. I know, I know: All babies are pretty. Except some really aren’t, are they? But Colby was an angel, and I’d fallen in love with him the moment my stepmother brought him home from the hospital.

  We’d lived in a yellow two-story house with a wraparound porch and big kitchen, a separate wooden garage set off to the side, and a narrow backyard. Gamma had moved into a small white house around the corner when my father remarried, but she’d already been gone for two years before the new family moved in down the block. I was thirteen. As soon as the moving van pulled away, they put a BEWARE OF DOG sign on their fence. Loud barking echoed from their yard every time I walked to school, but I soon learned it wasn’t the dog I needed to worry about as much as the fourteen-year-old son. Within a week, he’d established himself as a bully at school, and I started going a block out of my way to avoid his house.

  Of course, the boy found us, along with dog. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon. The dog was black and brown, a mix of too many breeds to identify any of them. The boy was gangl
y and pimply and mean. They stopped on the sidewalk in front of the yellow house with the boxwood hedge and the four-year-old boy playing with a toy dump truck on the lawn. I was sitting on the porch step, supposedly watching my little brother but really reading The Wind in the Willows for the third time. I didn’t even see them until Colby started sobbing.

  The dog was crouched like a jackal. The boy was just inside the hedge, grinning. His wrist was cocked back, ready to throw a second rock at my brother. Colby looked back at me with pleading, confused eyes brimming with tears. A red mark was beginning to form on his chubby arm where the first rock had struck.

  In a nanosecond, I was off that porch step and running, my arms waving wildly. I ran straight at the intruders, each of them bigger than me. I didn’t care. Wordless banshee shrieks of fury spewed out of my throat. Through the red haze, all I could think about was protecting Colby.

  The dog straightened to its full height, feet planted foursquare, lips beginning to pull back from yellow teeth. The boy started to laugh, but I kept right on coming at them, skinny legs pumping, growl-screaming at the top of my lungs.

  As I blew past my baby brother, the dog seemed to think better of whatever ill-laid plans its owner might have had and turned tail. It loped off toward home, looking back at me over its shoulder a couple of times. I remembered smelling the canine version of fear, and for a split second recognized that perhaps it wasn’t an evil creature at all, merely unlucky when it came to owners. The boy looked surprised, then shocked, then scared. He threw the rock at me, but it went wild as he, too, turned tail and ran, leaving behind an impressive trail of swear words.

  But I didn’t care about that. I cared about Colby, who by then was looking up at me with wide eyes and quivering lips. Then he gulped, opened his mouth, and let out a wail nearly as loud as my yelling had been. Seconds later, Wynn slammed open the front door to see what in tarnation was going on.

  Colby was more than a foot taller than me now, certainly not a little boy anymore. But I could see he was scared. This time it was for Larken, and not for himself, but I could feel the tight sharpness of his fear mixed with the same bewilderment that had been on his four-year-old face all those years ago.

  And it twisted my heart in exactly the same way now.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Why is Max Lang talking to Larken?”

  Colby put his arm around my shoulder. “He seems to be talking to everyone.”

  I frowned.

  “But he’s spending a long time with her. Apparently someone delivering room service down the hall saw Lark at Sontag’s door last night.” He glanced down at me. “It was before I managed to track her down. She told me she’d tried to make amends with Blake after their argument over dinner. She didn’t want him to be angry and give you a hard time during the interview this morning.”

  It took a moment to process. “She went to see him.” For my sake. “And that’s piqued Detective Lang’s interest.”

  My brother nodded, worry pinching the corners of his eyes.

  Nightshade for warning.

  Max turned his head and spotted me. A grim smile thinned his lips, and one eyebrow rose a fraction. He turned back to Larken, said something, and pointed to me standing in the lobby. She looked over and nodded. His smile stretched into something more like a grimace.

  I winced as the alarm that had been forming in my solar plexus tightened its claws. Detective Max Lang was my ex-husband’s best friend. He’d also tried to pin a murder on me, and I’d proven him wrong. He’d seen it as a public humiliation rather than true justice, and we’d managed to avoid each other since then.

  “How did Blake die?” I asked slowly.

  Colby shook his head. “I don’t know. But I heard Detective Lang say that, until they know for sure, they’re treating his death as a homicide.”

  A tiny, desperate sound escaped my throat, and his gaze sharpened. He looked back at Larken sitting in the bar, her hands folded on the table in front of her. Her expression was one of stunned disbelief. His fingers tightened on my shoulder as he turned me to face him.

  “Ellie, you think Detective Lang suspects her of killing that guy.”

  I didn’t say anything. It took all my effort not to look away.

  He gave me a little shake. “Don’t you?”

  “It’s possible,” I said.

  Panic rose in his eyes. He’d suspected it, but I’d just confirmed his fear.

  “You have to help her,” he said.

  “Colby . . .”

  “Ellie, you have to. I know Larken. She could never hurt anyone. I know you just met her, but—”

  “She didn’t do it,” I interrupted. “I believe you.”

  “So you have to help her.”

  “I don’t know how—” I began.

  “You cleared your own name a few months ago. Found the truth, and saved yourself. I . . .” He faltered. Took a deep breath. “I love her. Please help her.”

  He still had that look on his face, the one I remembered, and I kept seeing that pimply-faced boy with the rock in his hand. Only now he looked a lot like Detective Max Lang.

  I heard myself say, “I’ll try.”

  He smiled. It didn’t quite reach his worried eyes, but it was better than nothing.

  “First off, we need to know if it really was a homicide.” I turned toward the stairs and found Astrid had been standing right behind us. She’d heard everything.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said.

  Colby whirled. “Oh, Astrid. Hey. Go where?”

  “Up to Sontag’s room, I assume,” she said.

  I nodded. “That’s what I had in mind, but I think maybe it would be better if you stayed here.” I nodded toward Precious, now fast asleep in my friend’s arms.

  She looked down, and her gaze softened as though the pig were an actual child. “Right. I’ll stay here with Colby.” She looked around the lobby. “See what I can see.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said. Skipping the elevator, I headed for the wide stairway.

  CHAPTER 5

  PUTTING a slight swagger in my step that approximated confidence, I marched up the stairs. I didn’t know what room Blake Sontag had been in, but the Hotel California had only five floors. I paused at each landing and listened. On the third floor my ears were rewarded with the murmur of voices and the squawk of a police radio. I turned toward the sound.

  In front of one of the doorways, a uniformed policeman consulted with two women wearing white jumpsuits over their clothes. Deliberately not making eye contact, I walked toward them, scanning the room numbers. The door that was open to the hallway was number 344. The officer looked up as I paused at the threshold.

  “May I help you?”

  At the words, the woman standing on the other side of the king-size bed inside the room looked up and met my eyes.

  Thanking the gods of serendipity, I gestured vaguely toward her. “I’m looking for Detective Garcia.”

  The officer looked in and, at my friend’s quick nod, lost interest in me.

  Lupe came around the bed and toward where I stood in the doorway. “You can’t—”

  “I wouldn’t dream of coming in,” I said. “After all, I hear this is a crime scene.”

  She’d cut her smooth dark hair so it curved under her slightly square jaw. Wearing her usual uniform of slacks, crisp white blouse, blazer, and, today, penny loafers, she looked the professional from head to toe. And professional she was—unlike her colleague, at least in my experience.

  Now she murmured, “What are you doing here?” as she brushed by me and started down the hallway.

  It was obvious she wanted me to follow, but first I paused and took a good long look inside. A good long sniff, too, which I ended up regretting. The sour smell of vomit curled up from the other side of the bed, where Lupe had been standing, mixin
g unpleasantly with myriad commercial cleaning products that were no doubt part of the hotel’s housekeeping supplies, the scents of mint and dirt-but-not-dirt—valerian?—and underlying it all the unmistakable fragrance of tomato leaves.

  That last one gave me pause. My heart beat a little faster, and my breath grew shallow in my chest. The picture of nightshade in Gamma’s journal had been so worrying by itself that I hadn’t read all the notes around it, but I did remember the reference to the smell of tomato leaves.

  Nightshade as a warning was one thing. Nightshade as a weapon was something else entirely.

  Then I noticed the stain on the carpet in front of the bedside stand. The overturned cup at the edge of the dark blotch, white porcelain, matching the one over by the coffeemaker on the shelf by the flat-screen television.

  And there, just peeking out from under the bed skirt: two dried purple berries and a length of stringy fiber I recognized as a root.

  On the other side of the bedside table, the phone cord lay uselessly on the carpet under the wall jack.

  “Ellie.” Lupe’s voice was harsh enough that the officer looked up again, eyes narrowed.

  I shot him a smile and ambled down to where she waited.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked again, impatience in her voice.

  “My brother’s in town. You remember me telling you about Colby?”

  She nodded but still looked puzzled.

  “Well, he’s staying here with his girlfriend.”

  Her face cleared. “Ah. That’s all. What room?”

  “I, uh . . . I don’t know.”

  The frown returned to her forehead. “I don’t understand. Are you wandering around the hotel hoping to run into him? Just give him a call for heaven’s sake.”

  My laugh sounded weak. “No, no. I know where he is. In the lobby. With everyone else, it seems.” I gestured toward Sontag’s room. “Quite the excitement, eh?”