It felt like an accusation. “It was just a nightmare,” I said.
“Are you thinking that your temperature the other night might be related to all this?”
I handed him one of the books I found in Gemma-Kate’s room, the one about forensic toxicology. “So you won’t admit the kid is just plain bad.”
Carlo read the title and handed it back to me. “I think it’s dangerous to associate a book with actions or even ideas. After all, I read Christopher Hitchens, and I’m not an atheist, I just respect his thought. My love, I don’t want to sound disloyal to you, but I have a hard time admitting I can’t answer your questions without asking others. Such as, if Gemma-Kate means you harm, why did she have me put you in the bathtub the other night to bring down your fever?”
If there was a logical answer to that, I couldn’t see it. But did there need to be any logic in what Gemma-Kate was doing?
I had never been afraid of anyone, not really, until now. What to do with this person? Used to joke about her being a bad seed. Not laughing now. I’d spent time among psychopaths, serial murderers and killers for profit, men and women who never flinched when they pressed the trigger, and never thought about it after.
But I’d never entertained someone like that in my home. Gemma-Kate had all the basic equipment. And it looked like for the first time in her life (or maybe not the first) she was using it.
I got Subways for dinner so I knew they hadn’t been tampered with. And while I was cleaning up I threw away all the spices, anything that had been opened. Took my pill with the sub so I wouldn’t be so sick. Felt sick anyway and took some more antinausea drugs. I was starting to feel the effects of the accident, too.
When Carlo turned off the lights for the night I brought the Pug and her water dish into our room and locked the bedroom door. We both took something the hospital had given us for the pain that was sure to feel worse in the morning.
Suppressing a grunt, Carlo rolled over onto his side facing me and kissed my hairline above my ear, then studied me in the half-dark. When he spoke he sounded like he had a cold, maybe from swelling in his nose. “How’s it going, O’Hari?”
I shook my head, not wanting, or rather not able, to describe what was going on inside and outside my head. I imagined my face looked as sad as his. The cuts and darkening bruises were bad enough. He opened his mouth again, maybe to say something that would fix the problem, ease the pain, but then he shut it again. Our love was still there, but it felt like we were caught in a huge icy bowl with the sides too steep and slippery for either of us to crawl up and over the edge and help the other one out.
I didn’t tell him that, after my talk with Sig, certain that I could no longer deal with her myself, I had decided to turn Gemma-Kate over to the cops.
I slept soundly for the first time in many nights. Next morning I got up to find Carlo and Gemma-Kate already up and about. Stiff and sore from yesterday’s accident, tight in muscles that I hadn’t realized had been punished, I shuffled like a zombie into the kitchen, poured out the coffee in the pot, and made some myself. I stood by the pot watching until there was enough, and filled a cup. The cup felt heavy. Funny how in movies people get flung around on helicopter blades and don’t feel like this the next day.
Too out of it to recognize the irony of doing a threat assessment in my own house, I looked out back and was relieved to see Carlo standing at the fence, staring at the mountains and meditating or something, from the back looking as droopy as I felt. The female Pug, was it Peg? That shouldn’t be hard to remember; she was lying on the back porch.
I could hear an aggressive tapping from my office and took a couple steps in that direction to see Gemma-Kate at my office computer. The heavy-heartedness I felt at letting Marylin down sucked out the will to scream at her. It was too early to call Tony Salazar and tell him I was bringing my niece downtown. I nuked the lavender bunny Mallory had given to me, draped it around my neck, dropped an Alka-Seltzer in my coffee, and took it out on the back porch along with the toxicology book I’d taken from Gemma-Kate’s stash. It was hard going, lots of formulae and chemical structures. I wondered what normal looked like anymore, wondered how I could bring it back without putting Marylin’s child in prison.
Gemma-Kate came out and sat in the other porch chair across the table from me. If she noticed I had her book she didn’t say. She acted as if our blowup the day before had never happened. She had several pages she said she’d printed off of WebMD. “I keyed in all your symptoms I knew about and got from Carlo,” she said, dispensing with any cutesy name she had for him. “They’re pretty strange. Nausea with vomiting, anxiety, insomnia, paranoia, hallucinations, bizarre behavior. Are you constipated?”
I made a mental note to get a recommendation for a good criminal defense lawyer who handled insanity pleas. I might turn Gemma-Kate in, but for Marylin’s sake I wouldn’t just walk away.
I said, “Oh, leave me alone, for God’s sake. I’m too sick and tired to deal with you. And I’m hurt. Please,” I added, remembering that we were supposed to treat her with kid gloves lest she murder us in our beds or set the house on fire. Carlo turned from the fence and saw us, gave a gentle wave, crossed his arms, and kept watching.
“I’m sorry I implied you were a psychopath,” Gemma-Kate said, her eye now on the book in my lap. “You shouldn’t have come at me that way, Aunt Brigid. We got angry. We said things. Maybe we even meant them. But you started it.”
Oh, she was good. I put the book on the table, the title toward her. “What’s with this?” I asked.
Gemma-Kate turned the book around so the title was facing me. “All that weirdness lately, you were pretty scary that night I found you in the backyard, muttering ‘all dark, all dark,’ and then the referral to the movement disorder specialist, and the sudden high fever the other night. You weren’t doing anything about it. I got curious. So I started researching. But it wasn’t till yesterday when you brought up intentional poisoning that things started to fall into place. Maybe you’re right.”
“Why didn’t you say something yesterday?”
“You’re hardly listening to me now when you’re calm. Do you think you would have listened to anything I had to say yesterday when you went berserk?” She paused to write “irritability” on the page in front at her, then said, “Almost everything is neurological.”
“Just like what happened at the church. Small doses of antifreeze, maybe?”
Would they arrest Gemma-Kate on my accusation? And if not, what would I do with her? Get her out of the house, a room in that motel down the street, I remembered.
I’m sorry I failed you, Marylin.
And in the meantime, don’t take any chances. I had thrown out the spices. Today I’d get rid of everything else in the cupboards and the refrigerator and restock them again.
Gemma-Kate said, “What about a combination of nutritional supplements? You can have some weird-ass symptoms by overdosing on certain vitamins and things like melatonin or St. John’s wort.”
Until you can get her out of the house, just play along
. “I don’t take anything but a multivitamin,” I said.
“That’s not true, Aunt Brigid. I looked in your medicine cabinet. You’ve got enough controlled substances in there to make a living on them. By the way, your doctor’s office called the other day when you were out.”
“Neilsen?”
“I suppose so. Some assistant. They just said your blood work was normal. Cholesterol a little high.”
“You’re trying to tell me I’m not being poisoned,” I slurred. My lips hurt.
“Not necessarily. But it could be some environmental toxin. Even mold. Ergot causes hallucinations. What you’re complaining about is just weird, and if you’re ingesting something it doesn’t seem to have instant effects. But on the chance you’re right, I checked out some of the typical poisons that wouldn’t kill you immediately. Not strychnine or cyanide. Or a good dose of sodium chloride.”
I’d need evidence. You just don’t drop someone off at the police station. They wouldn’t incarcerate her on my say-so. They might question her, and then I’d have to bring her back home. Boy, if I thought she was pissed at something now … “If it was any of those poisons, I’d be dead, right?”
Get her out of the house and then make an appointment with a toxicologist
. Was there such a thing? I’d check the yellow pages. Could go to Neilsen, but I didn’t trust him either. There was something too coincidental about my getting sick just at the time I started asking questions about Joey. But then what about Gemma-Kate’s connection?
Maybe I could pay George Manriquez to draw some blood and send it to the lab.
Come on, brain, work with me.
“Right,” Gemma-Kate said.
I looked at her. She was a little blurry. “What?”
“If someone is poisoning you—and we’re not certain about that—they’re either inefficient or they don’t want to kill you. Or not immediately.”
“Arsenic.”
Gemma-Kate nodded. “Obvious. Arsenic is a good slow poison. I read about a guy who went blind in one eye before they found out his wife was giving him small doses of arsenic.” She looked away from me, toward Carlo and the mountains, seeming to have forgotten about me. But then she turned back. “The initial symptoms are good skin and bright eyes, and that’s not your case. Even if you weren’t all scabby, your skin is bad and your eyes are bloodshot. Even that tells me it’s organic rather than psychosomatic.”
“Thanks, Cupkate.”
If she noticed my sarcastic use of the family term of endearment she didn’t acknowledge it. “Plus, as time went on with arsenic you’d get a black edge on your gums. Let me see your teeth.”
I lifted my upper lip in something like a sneer. A painful prick told me I had again cracked open that spot on my lip where the air bag hit it.
“No,” she said, after a glance. “I don’t think it’s arsenic.”
The caffeine was slowly making me more alert. I looked over at her again. “Why are you toying with me like this?” I asked.
“I don’t want you to die,” she said, purposely ignoring my implication.
Gemma-Kate smiled as much as she ever did. It struck me again how the sicker I was the kinder she was.
“Why not?” I asked.
She stared at me without comment. If eyes are windows to the soul, I would have sworn she didn’t have one.
“Why don’t you want me to die?” I asked again.
“You really need me to answer that?”
“Sure, give it a shot,” I said, wondering how good this lie would be.
She seemed to consider various responses while actual undefinable emotions traveled across her face so quickly they could have been my imagination. When she spoke it wasn’t to hand me some bullshit about loving her Aunt Brigid. “Okay, I’ve got two reasons. The first is that you’ve accused me of multiple poisonings, including one that resulted in homicide. You’ve locked out all other possibilities, and if I don’t clear myself, I’m fucked. You’re going to turn me in, aren’t you?”
I didn’t answer her question. “Good reason. What about the second?”
“Even if you couldn’t successfully build a case against me, if you think I’m trying to kill you you’re going to get rid of me. I’m too young to live on my own and I’m not eligible for in-state tuition. I’m not going back to Fort Lauderdale. I hated it there.”
It was, I thought, the first honest exchange we had had since Gemma-Kate arrived. Not so kind after all. But while her words were harsh, the logic of them wedged the first little doubt in my mind that I could be wrong about her. The rest of my mind considered that she was really smart and playing me big-time.
Consider having a psych evaluation done.
Maybe she was certifiably insane and we could head off a murder charge that way. A side benefit of putting her away would be others might be saved.
Carlo had walked from the back of the yard to where we sat on the porch. Now he was close enough I could see the white bandage stuck over the top of his nose.
“Elias is picking me up to go get a rental car,” he said. He still sounded stopped up.
“Do we need it?”
“Might as well, the insurance covers it. How are you feeling today?”
“Like I ran into a saguaro cactus,” I said. “My face hurts.”
“Mine, too. Will you be all right here?” he asked, glancing inadvertently at Gemma-Kate.
“Sure. Go.”
By this time Gemma-Kate seemed to have totally shed her childlike perkiness, an unnecessary disguise. Without acknowledging Carlo she had gotten up and taken the forensic toxicology book with her into the house.
Questions I knew it would do no good to ask aloud:
What would Gemma-Kate do to prevent my sending her home?
Was this an elaborate ruse to make me think I was crazier than I actually was?
A ploy to convince me of her innocence?
Was thinking these things proof that I was crazy?
Or was Gemma-Kate not poisoning me?
And if she was not, what the hell was wrong with me?
Could she actually help me find out?
But I couldn’t ask her these questions. What I could ask when I followed her into her room and indicated the pile of books was “Where did you get all these?”
“Online.”
“How?”
“I used your credit card.”
Either Gemma-Kate was truly bad, or for the first time we were, if not on the same page, at least in the same library. Whatever the case, I used it as an excuse to delay calling Salazar. Just as I was about to make a second pass through my questions, my cell phone interrupted my gerbil-in-a-wheel mind. Thinking it might be Mallory finally calling me back I muttered, “Do not move from this place,” and stepped into the living room, where I trusted the phone to be in the bottom of my tote by my reading chair where I left it. Oh for the days when you could be certain where to answer your phone. When the phone rang again I noticed it was actually the landline on the kitchen counter. It started to go to voice mail but I interrupted in time.
It was Mallory. “What the hell are you doing to me, Brigid?”