The Poison Artist

by Jonathan Moore

  Five minutes later, a car slowed in front of the house, and then the garage door started up on its tracks. As the car turned into its drive, Caleb crossed the street, staying off to the right where the driver wouldn’t see him if he happened to check the rearview mirror. Caleb stepped into the garage after the car pulled inside. He pressed against the wall as the rolling door started down.

  The driver’s door opened and Caleb came out of the shadows, moving around the back end of the car.

  “Have a seat, Henry. But keep the door open.”

  He put five fingers on Henry’s chest and pushed him back into the driver’s seat. Henry’s feet were on the garage floor.

  “Caleb—Jesus.”

  Caleb leaned down and looked into the car to be sure no one else was in it.

  “Keep your hands on your knees,” he whispered.

  “What is this?”

  “What’s it look like?” Caleb said. He was holding the motorcycle helmet behind his back with one hand, keeping it from Henry’s view.

  “You should turn yourself in. I could call it in for you. We could wait outside.”

  “That’s funny, Henry,” Caleb said. “Give me your phone.”

  “What?”

  “Your phone. Take it out of your pocket.”

  Henry dug the phone from his pants and started to hand it across to Caleb.

  “No. Turn it off first. Show me. I wanna watch you do it.”

  “Jesus, Caleb.” Henry turned off the phone. He handed it to Caleb. “You happy now?”

  “Not yet. What’s the password?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Caleb turned on the phone, watched it reach its home screen without asking for a password.

  “Put your hands back on your knees,” Caleb said. “And be quieter. I don’t want Vicki coming down here.”

  “What do you want?”

  That was a fair question. Caleb didn’t know exactly what he wanted. He wanted answers. He wanted to know who Emmeline was—or what she was. He didn’t think Henry would have that, but he might have something.

  “The Haas-Lilienthal House, where Marcie was killed. Have you and I ever been there together?”

  “What the fuck, Caleb?” Henry whispered. “Kennon’s running the biggest manhunt in Northern California since the Zodiac killings. Looking for you. And you show up at my house, jump out of the garage, and want to know about that?”

  Caleb cocked his head.

  “We were there?”

  Henry stared at him open-mouthed.

  “With our class,” Henry said. “Caleb, you don’t remember this? You really don’t?”

  “No.”

  “When you disappeared, that’s where it happened. One minute we were upstairs with Mrs. Copenhagen, with the other kids, and then when we went into the next room, you were gone.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “They searched the place, tore it to pieces. And when they didn’t find you, they made us wait on the school bus. The police and the chaperones went through the neighborhood. Door to door.”

  Henry had been looking at his feet on the garage floor, but now he looked up and found Caleb’s eyes.

  “The hardest thing to see was when they brought your mom,” Henry said. “She was barely back on her feet. She dropped her cane and fell in the street. She was screaming. You have to know this, Caleb.”

  “I don’t.”

  “But the newspapers talked about it. And I know you’ve read the stories.”

  “The stories just said it was a museum,” Caleb said. “They didn’t say which one.”

  “It was Haas-Lilienthal.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Caleb, come on,” Henry said. “I was there. When you were gone, when we couldn’t think of anything else to help your mom, my parents and I would hang flyers. We put them up and down Franklin Street. On the telephone poles and the parked cars. I taped one to the Haas-Lilienthal’s front porch.”

  Suddenly, the memory was so clear, he could see them: flyers covered both sides of Franklin Street. They were stapled to telephone poles and taped to lampposts, their bottom edges fringed with tear-away strips waving in the breeze. Smaller leaflets were tucked under the windshield wipers of parked cars, where an earlier rain had soaked them to the glass.

  They all asked the same question, in oversize, bold print:

  HAVE YOU SEEN CALEB ELLIS?

  When Caleb was fourteen and his mother could walk again without a limp and could show her face in the daylight once more, she remarried. He became Caleb Maddox. In the years between—after he reappeared but before she remarried—they went back to her maiden name. For those years, he was Caleb Bellamy. But in the two weeks he was missing, his mother was only half alive, with another year of surgery in front of her. It had not yet occurred to anyone to legally drop the monster’s name. So Henry and his parents would have printed Caleb Ellis on their flyers, the text running above a black-and-white school photo.

  Caleb looked at Henry, his eyes pulling back into focus. He wanted to rub them clear, but it stung too much to touch them.

  “They found me outside,” he whispered.

  He didn’t remember that either, but he’d read it. Henry looked at him and nodded.

  “You’d been gone exactly fourteen days,” Henry said. “Almost to the minute. Your fingers were scratched up, the nails all broken. You were covered with dirt, had spider bites on your arms and face. But otherwise, you were fine. They never got anything out of you that made sense. A lot of people thought a man must have grabbed you.”

  “Kidnapped me.”

  Henry nodded.

  “Then, either he let you go or you escaped. They figured sooner or later, you’d start talking. But—”

  There were footsteps from upstairs: Vicki was crossing the hardwood floor above them. They both looked at the garage ceiling, then at each other. Over their heads, Vicki opened the front door and let someone in.

  “But what?”

  “But it never felt right,” Henry whispered. “That kidnapping theory. And I had a hunch. With the job at the ME, I could finally do something about it. Last night I started checking the police reports up in Pacific Heights, from back then.”

  “You always want to dig through my life, or is this a new thing?” Caleb asked. “And don’t you dare shout out. I don’t care who’s up there with Vicki. This is just you and me.”

  Henry ignored him and went on. But he kept his voice low.

  “In the two weeks you were gone, there were ten break-ins within five blocks of Haas-Lilienthal. That was like a one thousand percent spike for the neighborhood. They never caught anyone,” Henry said. “But it stopped after you came back.”

  Caleb was gripping the motorcycle helmet so tightly, he thought it might crack.

  “You’re saying it was me?”

  Henry held up his hand, and Caleb had to fight back an urge to grab it.

  “What do you think I was stealing?”

  “Food,” Henry said. “You were stealing food. That’s the only thing that was missing from the houses.”

  Half a minute passed. Caleb wanted to shout that he didn’t remember, that this was crazy. He wanted to beat Henry with the motorcycle helmet until he started making sense. Finally, he took a step back, to be farther from his friend.

  “Everyone said I was kidnapped. I spent my whole life feeling dirty, wondering what he did to me. Looking over my shoulder, expecting either my father or something even worse—and you think I was hiding in the house the whole time?” he asked. “Sneaking out at night, breaking into people’s pantries? That I was just playing some kind of sick prank?”

  Henry shook his head. Not in disagreement, but in pity.

  “It makes as much sense as anything else,” Henry said. “If you think about it, try to process it.”

  “Now you’re a therapist.”

  “You never went to therapy. Maybe you should�
�ve. Or maybe we should’ve just talked,” Henry said. When Caleb didn’t respond, he went on. “I think you found a crawlspace or something. A hiding place that everyone missed. And then when the cops were finally gone and the house was empty, you could do whatever it was you wanted to do.”

  “Which was what, Henry?”

  “Be in another world for a little while. Of all the kids who ever needed another world—”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “It isn’t—and I’m not saying it was a prank you were playing. I started researching last night, when you escaped the hospital. Reading case studies. I should’ve done it years ago. But it wasn’t a joke you were playing. I think it was something else. A dissociative fugue, maybe.”

  “A fugue?”

  Henry nodded and looked up at Caleb.

  “It’s like a complete break, a kind of—”

  “I know what it is.”

  “Then you know it fits.”

  “Henry—you need to drop it.”

  “I’m just saying. Because in the right person, trauma sets it off. Extreme trauma, in your case. You disappeared the first day you went back to school. The first time you had a chance, when no one was watching every move you made. You can’t tell me they’re not linked, the disappearance and what came before it.”

  Caleb shut his eyes and bit on the tip of his tongue. He had to focus. That was the way back. He shook his head and opened his eyes.

  “You can think whatever you want, Henry,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I just want to know about the house. You saw me go upstairs? Back then?”

  “You want Kennon to believe that’s how your hair got there? That no one’s used a vacuum cleaner in that house since then?”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “We went upstairs.”

  “And before that, did we see the painting? The one of the girl?”

  Henry nodded.

  “We saw it.”

  “Last summer, you took us for the weekend on Toe Tags. We spent the night at Angel Island. You remember that?”

  “I remember,” Henry said.

  “Sunday, we went to Sausalito and had lunch at the Trident. That restaurant on the pier.”

  “So what?”

  “Bridget told us a story, didn’t she? Or, she tried to. About a paper she wrote, for her master’s.”

  Henry shook his head.

  “Caleb—you’ve been circling the same thing for decades, and you don’t even know it. It was a mistake, that we never talked about it. I thought you were doing okay. Grad school, the lab, Bridget—why talk about it when it was all going so well?”

  Caleb was barely listening.

  “The Trident’s been closed since then, hasn’t it?”

  Henry nodded, and Caleb wasn’t sure what was on his friend’s face. It wasn’t fear anymore. It might have been sadness, or pity.

  “Pier got hit by a loose barge,” Caleb said. He’d read it in the paper the weekend after their trip. “Snapped some of the pylons—building’s not safe anymore.”

  Caleb massaged his temple with his thumb. His eyes were stinging and his lips felt like he’d touched them to a live wire. They were cracking and splitting between the needle holes. He’d forgotten their lunch at the Trident, forgotten what they’d talked about. Now he had an image of the table where they’d been sitting, out on what used to be an upstairs deck. Bridget had told them something, pointing once up to the north end of Richardson Bay, toward San Quentin. It hadn’t seemed important at the time.

  He looked up at Henry.

  “Why’d you change the subject that day?” he asked. “You cut her off. Why didn’t you let her finish?”

  “Why do you think?” Henry said. “I know what’s good for you to think about, and what isn’t. And you never told her about your father, or what happened at the house, after. You can’t talk about that painting without going there.”

  Part of that was true, anyway. He’d left a lot out for Bridget. He’d never told her why Henry sometimes looked at him sideways when he was quiet for too long. Why Henry concerned himself with what Caleb should think about, and what he shouldn’t.

  “They really found my hair upstairs?”

  “Kennon says he did.”

  “Shit.”

  Caleb backed up and leaned against the wall, pinning the motorcycle helmet against it with his back.

  “You should turn yourself in, Caleb,” Henry whispered.

  “I told Kennon how that got there,” he said. “She kissed me in the kitchen.”

  “Who kissed you?”

  “Emmeline,” Caleb said. “The girl from the painting. It could’ve gotten on her dress when she kissed me. My hair, my DNA. Then she went upstairs. Said she needed to close a window. I was cooking the second course.”

  “Caleb,” Henry said softly, “please turn yourself in. If you want me to, I can drive you there now.”

  Caleb stood again and picked up the motorcycle helmet.

  “No,” he said.

  He stepped up to Henry, then reached past him, into the car. He felt along the sun visor and hit the remote for the garage door. The door started to roll up slowly.

  “I saw Bridget tonight,” Henry said. “Saw what you did to her. She’ll be okay. But, Caleb—”

  “Henry, I didn’t do that.”

  “Then who the fuck did?”

  “Ask Bridget.”

  “She doesn’t remember anything. Which is how you wanted it. You knew what those drugs would do,” Henry said. He wasn’t whispering anymore. “When she was already drunk, you pumped her full of BZDs. Then you either pushed her, or she was running away from you and went off the deck. God knows what you would’ve done if you’d caught her—but it’s all a little too close to your father, isn’t it? The sewing, the chisels you left in the bedroom.”

  “It was Emmeline!”

  He started for the door. Henry stood up from the car and grabbed his wrist.

  “Where you gonna go, Caleb? You can’t run from this!”

  Caleb tried to pull his arm away, but Henry was too strong. Instead, they fell together into the utility shelves that lined the wall. Caleb dropped the helmet and scrabbled with his free hand along the upper shelf until his fingers touched a wooden handle. Tools rained across the concrete floor when he brought the hammer off the shelf. He cocked his arm but didn’t swing. He’d never swing at Henry. Surely they both knew that. But Henry dropped his wrist and went backwards until he was pressed against the car.

  “I can find her,” Caleb said. “And I can end it.”

  Caleb didn’t take his eyes from Henry as he knelt to retrieve the helmet. Then he turned and ran up the street, and didn’t hear whatever Henry was shouting behind him.

  It was a mistake to have let Henry see the helmet. It was a mistake to have gone to see Henry at all. Now they’d know what he was wearing, and how he was getting around. So he couldn’t waste any time now.

  He had to get across the Golden Gate Bridge.

  He sprinted the last three blocks to the motorcycle, knelt next to its front tire, and fiddled the paperclip into place. He put on the helmet, mounted the bike, and started it. From Bay Street it was easy to reach the Golden Gate Bridge. On the bike, it would be two minutes across the Presidio.

  There wasn’t much traffic, but when he came to slower cars, he veered around them, doing his best to outrun his own headlight. The streets were slick with rain, so that he skidded through the turns, but he didn’t spill the bike. When he came to the toll plaza he slowed to thirty and rolled through it, knowing the cameras were scanning his plates. If this bike’s owner didn’t have a bridge pass account, he’d be getting an invoice in a few weeks. By that time, it wouldn’t matter.

  Then Caleb was on the bridge itself, listening to the change in pitch as the ground dropped from beneath the road. The bike thumped over the segmented sections of the roadway and he cruised under the south tower doing the speed limit. He checked his mirrors and saw no
thing. Just the electric gloom of the city lost in its weather.

  There was a scenic overlook about a quarter of a mile after the bridge reconnected with land. Caleb pulled off and parked the bike, then sat straddling it as its engine idled. When Emmeline had escorted him from the Invicta to take him upstairs, he’d mostly been focused on her. On the touch of her arm, and the shape of her body beneath the soft cloak. But he’d heard the foghorn on the Golden Gate Bridge, and he’d smelled the bay. He was sure it had been the bay and not the open ocean on the other side of the peninsula. There were no buildings on the ocean side.

  So Emmeline lived in Sausalito.

  If she were any farther north—in Tiburon or Mill Valley—the foghorn would be too far away to hear. And Sausalito fit the rest of the facts. He and Henry had cruised all over the bay sampling sewage treatment plants, and he’d proved beyond a doubt that Charles Crane had been lodged under an outflow pipe between Sausalito and the bridge. Emmeline had five thousand square feet on the second floor of a wooden building on the Sausalito waterfront, and her windows were boarded up from the inside. He had a good idea where that was.

  Not just a general area, but the exact building.

  Before he put the bike back in gear, he took Henry’s cell phone from his pocket. It was still on. He switched it off, then put it away.

  From the scenic pullout, it was only two miles to downtown Sausalito. He took it slowly, the wind in his face carrying night smells of wet eucalyptus and bay laurel. A coyote ran across the road in front of him, stopping long enough to flash its eyes before disappearing up the hillside. When he got to the last curve before the center of the town, he could see his destination ahead. He parked the bike three hundred yards short of the restaurant, and finished the distance on foot.

  Both the pier and the building were still standing, but the angles were wrong.