“She is.” Dashay wore a green-and-black batik-print dress that made a pool of freshness in the room. “Along with that Root, who’s sitting in her chair like a sphinx, all full of secrets she’s not telling. You know what she’s up to?”
I told her about meeting Malcolm, about the moment when he and I arrived at the conclusion that Root was responsible for the fire in Sarasota. “She could have put Dennis up to it. And she could be the one who made my father sick,” I said. “After all, she had the opportunities. She’s the one who made his blood supplements.”
“Why would she all of a sudden want to hurt Raphael?” Dashay said.
“I don’t know.”
She sighed. “And what happened to you? Why are you here, looking like somebody killed your best friend?”
She and I winced simultaneously.
“Ari, I’m sorry,” she said.
I shook my head. I couldn’t put what I felt into words, but I let her sense the depth and weight of my feelings: about losing Kathleen, and Mysty, and Autumn, and about finding Bernadette and Walker together.
After a while she said, “Didn’t I tell you? Love is misery.” She looked into my eyes again. “You haven’t had a thing to eat, since when? Come on and help me doctor Ms. Root. Then we’ll do some serious cooking.”
Ms. Root did not want to be doctored.
She sat, squat and impervious as a beetle, on the upholstered chair at the foot of my father’s bed. Her posture told us she was not about to go anywhere.
Dashay and my mother both tried to hypnotize her. If the problem hadn’t been serious, the spectacle would have been funny.
Dashay sat on the end of the bed, close to the blanket that covered my father’s feet. I wondered if he heard any part of what we were saying. If he did, he showed no sign of consciousness.
“Mary Ellis, I drove up here to talk to you.” Dashay’s voice was singsong, deepened by an emphatic Jamaican lilt. “I came here, all this way, to talk to you. I can see your eyes, now can you see mine?”
Root smiled—the sort of smile others call a smirk. I’ve never liked that word.
“Look at me.” Mãe moved in front of Dashay and bent over Root. “Mary Ellis, you need to take some deep breaths. In and out, deep breaths. Now your eyes are tired, and they want to close. Let them close.”
Root laughed, a sound like gargling dirty water.
Dashay and Mãe alternated their efforts. I watched, agonized, sure they had no chance at putting her under. Then I noticed a half-full glass of Picardo on the small table next to Root’s chair.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” I said. No one seemed to notice.
In the bathroom’s medicine cabinet I found a pill bottle with my mother’s name on it: sleeping pills prescribed by Dr. Cho. I took six of them into the kitchen and ground them up with the bottom of a spoon. Then I used the spoon to push them into a glass. I added two healthy shots of Picardo and stirred. Next, I poured three more glasses and set them all on a tray, careful to keep the unadulterated ones on the left.
With the tray in my arms, I went back to my father’s room.
“I’d find this annoying if it wasn’t completely ludicrous.” Root took the glass I handed her and gulped from it.
After I passed around the other glasses, I sat on the floor below the window. A sip of Picardo further cleared my head. Dashay had been right—something was in that water.
Mãe walked back and forth across the room. “You’ve been with our family for a long time. Raphael so admired your work, and we always thought you were our loyal friend.”
“But friends don’t try to poison their research partners.” Dashay leaned forward from her seat on the bed, peering at Root’s eyes. She sat back again. “Friends don’t set fires.”
They were playing good cop, bad cop. It wasn’t working.
Root watched them with undisguised contempt. “What have you ever done for him?” she said to my mother. “You deserted him. You didn’t take care of your own baby—the child you tricked him into having.” She took another drink from the glass.
Mãe’s face contorted. She wasn’t strong enough to hear this.
“Yes, I know about that.” Root’s voice was smug. “I know about all of it.”
I tried to tune in to her thoughts, but heard only the usual static.
“You know nothing.” Dashay’s voice was like a hiss. “You think you know, and all you know is lies.”
Root tipped her head to one side. “When it comes to lies, you’re the expert here. You lied to your family back in Jamaica, you lied to that poor half-breed Bennett. And when they realized you were lying, they all abandoned you.”
Dashay flinched.
I thought, Bennett is half-human, like me?
Root must have heard my thought. She turned to me. “Yes, another half-breed like you. Another child that in the end, no one wanted. A constant embarrassment to humans and vampires alike. You’ll never be accepted by them, and you’ll never truly be one of us.”
My eyes went to my father, instinctively expecting him to defend me. But he never moved.
No one spoke. She’d managed to wound each of us, and her satisfaction was evident. She sat back in her chair and finished the glass of Picardo.
Dashay sat on the bed, her shoulders slumped. Mãe leaned against the wall near me, her eyes closed. I kept my eyes on Root. And the second her eyes began to glaze, I said, “Dashay. Now.”
Dashay raised her head. Root’s eyelids had begun to droop, but she tried to open them wider as Dashay moved toward her.
“I see you now.” Dashay’s voice crooned, as if she were talking to a baby. “Oh, you’re so pretty. So ugly, ugly as sin. What a beauty you are. What a cretin. No mother could love you. My little beauty. Come out now, come to me.”
Her voice deepened, then rose. I put my hands over my ears. Mãe sat next to me, put her arm around my shoulders.
Was it ten minutes or an hour later that we saw the first sign of it? None of us could remember, afterward. But we all watched as a trickle of black fluid emerged from the corner of Root’s left eye. The trickle thickened, coagulated, and became a kind of blob that oozed out onto her cheek. Dashay crooned and beckoned and cupped her hands, waiting to receive it.
I didn’t see the last part—Dashay bent over Root, hiding her face. Then Dashay spun around, and I uncovered my ears.
“Quick, Sara. Get me a plastic bag.” Dashay’s hands pressed together. Between them I saw the sasa: black and slimy looking, an amorphous shape against her fingers.
Mãe ran out and came back with a bag. She held it open while Dashay slid the thing inside and zipped it shut. “Want to see?” she asked me. There was a weird pride in her voice, as if she were a midwife instead of an exorcist.
“I can see from here.” I wanted to see, but I didn’t want to get too close. The sasa looked like black gelatin, marked by one pink ring—the mouth that must have attached itself to Root.
“Ugly,” Mãe said, her voice low.
Root lay back in the chair, her eyes closed, the bristles on her chin aimed at the ceiling.
“Never saw one so big.” Dashay held the bag by its top edge. “Never had to work so hard to get one out.”
“Get it out of here,” Mãe said.
While Dashay disposed of the sasa outside, Mãe and I looked at each other. We felt exhausted.
I pointed at Root. “What are we going to do with her?”
My mother took a deep breath. “We’re going to wait until she opens her eyes. Then, we’re going to hypnotize her.”
Her demon gone, Root wasn’t hard to put under. The lingering effects of the sedative helped.
Dashay returned, after washing her hands for five minutes. She sat next to me, and we watched Mãe interrogate Root.
“Why did you do it?” Her voice was low and even. “Why did you try to kill Raphael?”
“I never tried to kill him.” Root’s eyes were open wide now, but they had a dazed expression. For a moment I thought o
f Old Joe, and I wondered where he might be now.
Mãe consulted the list of questions we’d written out moments before. “Did you ask Dennis to start the fire at Xanadu?”
“Xanadu.” She sighed. “Dennis set the canister in the wrong place. I told him where to put it. He set the fire in the kitchen instead. Stupid.”
“Where was he supposed to put it?”
“In the doorway of the child’s room.” She said it without any emotion.
Dashay reached for my hand.
“So the fire was meant to kill Ariella?” My mother’s voice sounded strained, as if she were struggling to keep it calm.
“Of course. You can’t think it was meant for Raphael?” Root’s face seemed to lose shape, suddenly; it spread into sadness. “I didn’t aim to hurt Raphael. I was after his attention. It was high time! All those years I worked with him, and he considered me like a—like an appliance. Something he used to produce the results he wanted.”
Mãe glanced back at us, shook her head, then turned to Root again.
“So you made Dennis start a fire to get Raphael’s attention?” she asked.
“And to kill the child. A half-breed shouldn’t have survived a fire like that, and she wouldn’t have, if it had been set properly. I should have done it myself.” Root nodded vigorously. “I should have known better than to count on Dennis. All he cared about was becoming a vampire. He never paid attention to details.”
“That was the deal?” Mãe sounded authoritative again. “Dennis would become a vampire?”
“I said I’d make him a vampire.”
So she was one of us, I thought.
“But he botched it. I told him that, once we left the unit. ‘All deals are off,’ I told him, and you should have seen him then!” She grinned. Without question, she was the ugliest person I’d ever seen.
“As for Raphael, I gave him just enough quinine to make him realize he needed new tonic, that he needed me around to make it. I hadn’t seen him in months. No one told me how ill he was. I kept asking. Finally, Dashay told me he was here.”
Dashay was thinking that she should have kept her mouth shut. But I disagreed. If she had, we’d likely never have found out about Root’s sasa and her obsession with my father. Were they linked?
“So I drove up yesterday. And he didn’t seem too bad. He talked, and he looked as if he were on the mend.” Her eyes moved slowly from side to side as she talked, as if she were watching a metronome or a Ping-Pong match.
“Yes, he did look better.” Mãe’s voice was so low I could barely hear it. “Mary Ellis, did you do something to him?”
“I gave him a shot.”
We all stared at her.
“You gave him an injection?” Mãe’s voice sounded hoarse. “What was in the shot?”
“A little quinine,” Root said. “Not enough to do him real harm. Just enough to keep him still, enough to make him realize how much he needs me. In a few days I’ll bring him back again. I’ll save his life.” She nodded, sure of her plan.
Mãe turned to us. “Dashay,” she whispered. “Call Dr. Cho. Tell her we need her now.”
When Dashay had left the room, Mãe said to me, “Anything else?”
“Ask about the V drug,” I whispered.
She looked down at her list. “Mary Ellis, Ariella gave you a pill to analyze, a pill called Vallanium. What’s in the pill?”
“Vallanium is an addictive depressant, a semisynthetic opiate.” Her voice was crisp, as if she were reciting from memory. “It has the potential to permanently alter brain structure. Two capsules daily create a mild euphoria, but over time the drug disrupts normal brain activities. It renders users incapable of reading or logical analysis. Cessation of use causes severe withdrawal symptoms.”
I thought of Walker, and I shivered.
“You seem to know a lot about it,” Mãe said.
“I should.” Root looked pleased. “I helped develop that drug. We sold the patent to a group in Miami.”
“Ask her about Amrita,” I whispered.
This one wasn’t on Mãe’s list. “Um, what about Amrita?”
“It’s an antidepressant. One of the so-called lifestyle drugs, derived from jimson weed. It alters the brain, inhibiting certain neurotransmitters and enhancing others, producing selective amnesia. Amrita interferes with DNA replication and RNA transcription by alkylation and cross-linking the strands of DNA. It renders users sterile.”
Sterile? Malcolm hadn’t said anything about that.
“Did you make that one, too?” Mãe said.
“No. Amrita was created by a Nebulist research team in Britain.”
“Are you a Nebulist?”
Her face contorted. “I don’t belong to a sect. If I had to choose one, I’d lean toward the Colonists. They know how to keep humans in their place, and they don’t tolerate half-breeds.” Even though she was hypnotized, her eyes seemed to veer in my direction.
“Then why did you make Vallanium?”
Root shot back, “To see if I could. You won’t understand that. You are not a scientist.”
Mãe sent me the thought, Enough?
Too much, I thought.
Mãe recited the standard litany: When Root awakened, she wouldn’t remember being hypnotized or drugged. She wouldn’t remember a thing she’d said. And she would never again try to harm our family or anyone else.
It was a tall order, I thought. Why not ask her to find a cure for cancer?
Mãe heard me and sent me admonishment: This is no time to be sassy.
While Dashay and I made dinner, I asked her, “Did you drown the sasa in the ocean?”
“No, in the rain barrel out back.” She spooned pesto over the angel’s-hair pasta. “Then I buried it. You don’t need to bury them—they’re harmless once they’re dead—but this one was so very nasty that I didn’t want to leave it lying around.”
We ate dinner in my father’s room, balancing plates on our laps. We didn’t want to leave him alone.
Root had come out of her trance, and she sat, calm as a Buddha, twirling pasta onto a fork. She had no idea what she’d put us through. She didn’t even remember what she’d done to my father. Her demon gone, she was the familiar churlish woman I’d known since my childhood. I wanted to slap her.
I sent Dashay the thought: Why do we have to feed her?
Dashay sent back: Try to act normal.
Root glowered at us.
We didn’t talk much at first, but the food revived us. Mãe wanted to know what I was studying, and I told her about the Third-Parties Caucus. “There’s one candidate who may run for president,” I said. “Have you heard of Neil Cameron?”
Mãe and Dashay hadn’t.
Root said, “His name is familiar. He’s the senator from Georgia, right?”
I didn’t want to have a conversation with her, but I made myself nod.
“He’s a vampire.” She sucked the pasta from her fork and began to twirl another forkful as she chewed. I’d never seen anyone consume pasta as powerfully as Root did.
She inhaled another mouthful, chewed, and swallowed. “He’ll never make it,” she said.
“Why not?” I must have spoken more passionately than I’d intended, because Dashay and my mother stopped eating to watch me.
“Eventually his true nature will come out.” Root patted a napkin across her thick lips. “Some reporter will see him drinking blood, or one of his donors will talk to the press.”
“Maybe he takes tonic instead.”
Root shook her head, as if she knew better.
“What if he decides to run as a vampire candidate?” I hadn’t thought much about it until now. “What if he doesn’t hide who he is?”
“Then he’d be an idiot.” Root took a swig of Picardo. “Only he’s not. I met him once. He’s an old soul, probably a hundred and fifty years old by now. He knows better than to come out of the box.
“Americans will never elect a vampire.” Root belched—an awful noise
that reminded me of the furnace in the basement of our house in Saratoga Springs.
A hundred and fifty years old, I thought. That means a hundred-thirty-six-year age gap.
Dr. Cho strutted into the room and said, “What sort of circus is this?”
Chapter Seventeen
Dr. Cho shooed us out of my father’s room so that she could tend to him. She looked angry, as if she blamed us for his relapse—and later, when we told her about Root’s part in it, she seemed skeptical.
We didn’t tell her about the sasa. We didn’t think she’d believe in such things.
Root was ready to leave. She said that she’d be back the next day.
“No.” Mãe’s voice was clear and firm. “Once Raphael is ready to work again, we’ll let you know.”
Root stared at Mãe as if she’d never seen her before. Then, muttering something we couldn’t hear, she left.
Dashay nearly fell into a kitchen chair. “Sweet mother of life, what a night.”
I sat next to her. Mãe poured us glasses of cold spring water from the bottles Dashay had stored in the refrigerator. Then she took a chair across from mine. We sat and listened to the ocean, felt the breeze from the open window, rubbed our eyes. I wanted to scream.
Instead I broke the silence. “We didn’t ask Root what’s in the bottled water. I bet she’d know.”
Mãe looked confused until Dashay explained her theory. “Go fetch the bottle the nice nice man gave to you,” she said to me. “We can ask Dr. Cho to have it analyzed.”
“Better give her a sample of our tap water, too. And some of that water you brought from home.” Mãe stretched her arms behind her and shook the tension out of them. “First the bees are tainted. Now the water. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Dashay said, “but it looks to me as if someone’s out to take control of nature. Manipulate it, use it. I don’t know why. But I think Bennett is one of the victims.”
Then she confessed: the week before, she’d driven to Atlanta again. “This time I didn’t even bother going to his place,” she said. “I knew that woman would be there. So I called him up, told him the Internal Revenue folks needed to meet with him.”
The Year of Disappearances Page 23
