A Fierce and Subtle Poison (3 page)

We walked on. For a while it was so quiet, I could hear Mari’s sundress swish around her legs. I had the sense she thought that by bringing up my mom she’d tread unknowingly into a minefield and was searching for a way to retrace her steps. Eventually, she stopped. Her gaze had landed on something down the dar
k street, and I watched as a small smile spread across her face.

“What?” I asked.

Marisol pointed to the scientist’s house. I’d brought us straight to it without even realizing it.

“The other day my grandma told me that house is cursed,” she said, again repeating herself from last night. “It was some stupid story that another old lady at the market told her—about how anyone who goes into the house never comes out and that maybe the man who lives there eats them or something.”

I laughed. “
Eats
them?”

“Yes, eats them.” Marisol nodded soberly. “He puts them in a big pot with carrots, onions, and potatoes, and lets them simmer overnight. Have you not heard that?”

“I haven’t heard
that
,” I said. “But I heard that the house was cursed, yeah.”

I told Mari the señoras’ story about the scientist who kept his wife trapped with his bird and his plants, and also about how when we were kids my friends and I would make up our own stories.

“Rico said that a witch lived there and if you wrote a wish on a piece of paper and threw it to her, she would grant it.”

“Did you throw a wish?” Marisol asked. I tried to hide the truth but the strained expression on my face apparently gave me away. “You did!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands. “I know you did. What did you wish for?”

I shook my head. “I can’t tell you. Only the witch knows.”

Marisol let out a cry of mock-outrage just as the orange tom behind us expelled a guttural screech. I turned just in time to see it zip down a nearby alley.

Marisol released her hand from mine and ran over to the wall of the scientist’s courtyard. She picked at a flake of loose plaster with her fingernail and peered up at the tips of the leaves.

“This is where the stones came down from last night, right? I remember that!
Someone
has to be there or else all these plants would die. Come on, Lucas.” She reached down to slip off her sandals. “Give me a boost. We’ll solve the mystery, and then we’ll get to tell all the old ladies what the
true
true story is. If I don’t come back, just tell them I was eaten. They’ll understand.”

I was impressed. As long as I’d been coming to the island neither me nor any of my friends had ever thought of actually going
into
the scientist’s house. It had always been a place people judged from far away and made up stories about, not a place they would ever willingly enter.

“That wall is three feet taller than you,” I said, offering up the most rational response—one that didn’t involve poison or witches or curses. “Even if I gave you a boost, there’s no way you’d ever get back over.”

“There might be a ladder or something on the other side.” She stood on the balls of her feet and stretched her arms up to the sky. As much as she was willing herself to be a giant, it wasn’t happening. “A little help, por favor.”

“You
just
said something about not wanting your mom to worry about you and now you want to jump into a house that’s cursed.” Marisol ignored me and started taking little two-footed leaps into the air. She still came up very short. “You look ridiculous, by the way. Whatever you’re trying to do isn’t working.”

Marisol let out a burst of laughter and finally stepped away from the wall. As she put her sandals back on, one of the straps of her dress fell off her shoulder. I stepped closer and lifted it back in place.

For a moment, the tips of my fingers lingered against her warm skin. They traced the curve of her shoulder up to her throat. She leaned in, brushing her lips across my ear.

“Paper,” she whispered.

I jerked back. She was grinning. It was a devilish expression, made even more devilish by the mixed light from the moon and the orange-tinted street lamps.

“Do you? Have any?
Pay
-per?” she asked. “I want to make a wish. You can’t object to that. It’s something you’ve done yourself.”

“When I was a kid, yeah.”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Do you have paper or not?”

I dug into my pockets and pulled out a quarter, a couple of crumpled receipts, and the folded piece of hotel stationery on which my dad had scribbled the name and address of the place he’d be staying in Rincón. He’d written the information just under the embossed logo he was so proud of, a blood-red palm tree, and the name, Hotel St. Lucia.

Marisol snatched the piece of stationery from my hand and began to dig through her small, tooled leather purse. She pulled out a pen with a squeal of triumph, placed my dad’s note on her knee, and scribbled her wish on the back. She then wadded the paper up into a ball and pitched it over the wall.

“Do you want to know what I wished for?” she asked, twirling toward me.

“Yes, but don’t tell me.”

“That’s okay.” Marisol gripped my hand and started to lead me back down Calle Sol in the direction of Ruben’s house. “Only the witch knows now.”

Three

AFTER HAVING A
tense, chat-free breakfast with my dad bright and early the next morning, I went down to a jewelry shop in the touristy section of San Juan and bought Mari a charm for her necklace: a dime-sized head of a wolf, cast in pewter, in honor of her dream of playing French horn. The plan was to give it to her when I returned from Rincón in a couple of days.

Back in my room, I was lying on my bed flipping mindlessly through the channels when I landed on the news and the familiar headshot of Sara Fikes. The press apparently had only one picture of her, and they showed it something like seven times every thirty minutes, along with the phone number they’d set up for tips. In the photo, Sara was wearing a bright red jersey and holding a volleyball in the crook of her arm. Her long, board-straight dark hair was neatly swept over one shoulder. Her smile was toothy, forced-looking, like she’d been holding it too long and her jaw was getting sore.

“Police have expanded their search to include Santurce and some of the other outlying districts,” the television buzzed. “Meanwhile, Fikes’s parents vow to not return to Florida until their daughter has returned safely.”

Puerto Rican girls went missing all the time, and their faces were rarely on the news. The señoras referred to them as desaparecidas, the disappeared girls, and their stories always made the señoras cry when they told them. The desaparecidas were just ordinary girls who vanished from their beds or when they were walking home at night. The police did little to find them, and mostly assumed them to be runaways. Despite their families’ desperate pleas to God and the hundreds of votive candles lit in their honor, none of the girls were ever seen again—unless it was by Señora Gaona, who everyone said had gone loca after her third stroke. She sold fruit down at the Plaza de Mercado, and she swore that one night, years ago when she was going home from her daughter’s house near Condado Beach, she saw a teenage girl standing on the sidewalk, looking like she’d walked straight out of the ocean. Her hair was wet. Her feet and ankles were speckled with dried sand. Señora Gaona claimed she called out to the girl, asked her where she lived, but the girl didn’t answer. She told the girl to stay right there, that she was going for help, but by the time she’d come back with her son-in-law, the girl was gone.

I’ve heard Señora Gaona tell the story about the night she found the disappeared girl at least a dozen times. Each time, she’d look up to the sky, her eyes sparkling with tears, and recall how the air that night smelled of cinnamon and salt water.

My dad was also convinced that the desaparecidas were runaways, but no matter what he or the police said, I believed the señoras. I never thought their stories were just stories. And while Señora Goaona seemed a little batty, she never struck me as a full-blown liar.

Sara Fikes’s disappearance, however, was a different story. Since she was from the mainland, the cavalry got called in, and the police were doing “everything in their power” to reunite her with her parents.

I couldn’t help but think, though, that the thing with the camera was strange. She’d really just set it down and walked barefoot into the water? And the last photo she’d taken—what was it of?

I must’ve dozed off, because the next thing I remember is waking up with the remote in my hand and the lights, the television, and all my clothes still on. My stomach hissed. It was 2:00 p.m., time for lunch.

I swung my legs off the bed, and something on the ground caught my eye. One of the staff had slipped a piece of hotel stationery under my door while I was asleep. I crouched down to pick it up and saw three distinct sets of handwriting.

The first belonged to my dad:
Hotel de las Palomas, 24 Via San Angelica, Rincón
. When I turned the paper over, I noticed a scrawl of blue pen that must have belonged to Marisol:
I wish.
But whatever it was she’d wished for was illegible, crossed out by a series of heavy black lines. The third set of writing was in an unfamiliar, perfect cursive:

Sorry, Lucas,
it read.
This is one I just can’t grant.

Four

I STUDIED THE
web of creases spread across the piece of paper. Whoever had crossed out Mari’s wish had pressed down into the paper hard enough to create indentations. They hadn’t just wanted to erase her wish; they’d wanted to obliterate it.

On television, the newscasters were talking about the weather.

“Better hunker down,” they were saying. “Storms are coming.”

I picked up the phone on my nightstand and with shaky fingers dialed Marisol’s number. Her grandmother answered. “Mari no está!” she yelled into the receiver
.
“She’s probably with Ruth. My Mari is too good to be hanging out with that girl. She never asks about my health. She has bad manners.”

As I hung up, someone knocked on my door.

“Lucas! You up?”

It was Carlos, his voice muffled through wood.

I shoved the note into my back pocket and went over to open the door. In one fluid motion, Carlos plowed right past me, undid the buttons of his porter’s uniform, kicked off his shiny leather shoes, and collapsed onto my unmade bed. Then he grabbed the remote from the nightstand and started to flip through the channels.

“Sorry if I woke you,” he said.

I loved Carlos like a brother, but his timing couldn’t have been worse. All I wanted to do was find Marisol and figure out who crossed out her wish. I couldn’t shake the image from my head of a little girl with green skin and grass for hair, sitting in the courtyard of the house at the end of Calle Sol, sucking on leaves, waiting on wishes to land in her lap.

“No you’re not,” I replied, closing the door.

“You’re right, I’m not.” He spread out his limbs, creating an
X
across the mattress. “Ay, this bed!” Carlos’s eyes closed in rapture. “Lucas, you have no idea how good you’ve got it.”

Earlier in the summer, Carlos had asked me if I could get him a job at the hotel. He said he’d do anything: wash dishes, clean toilets, get down on both knees and kiss the tourists’ butts. All he wanted was to save enough money to get a one-way ticket off the island so he wouldn’t end up like his dad, working as a waiter out on the cruise ships for the rest of his life. A part of me hated seeing one of my best friends scurrying around the hotel in his bright white porter’s uniform and squeaky black shoes, saying
yes, sir
and
no, sir
, carrying suitcases up and down staircases and catering to every ridiculous request of every ridiculous guest, but he didn’t seem to mind it. He was the only one of our group who had a regular job, and every once in a while he’d celebrate his gainful employment by buying us all salt cod fritters and soda from the street vendors down by the pier.

“You on a break or what?”

My voice had an edge to it, but Carlos either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He took one of my pillows and shoved it under his head.

“No. I’m done. I worked the early shift. I’m telling you, this place is loco. You would not believe the shit that goes on down here.”

“You didn’t run into anyone that was looking for me, did you?”

“Nah.” Carlos turned onto his side so that he was facing me. He pushed his pomaded hair back into place and grinned like a little kid with a big secret. “But get this. This woman calls the desk this morning asking for towels, right? So I go down to housekeeping, get four of the whitest, fluffiest towels for this woman’s white, fluffy ass, and I go knock on the door. She answers—I swear to you—naked.” He paused, I assumed to allow me time to draw up a mental image. “No clothes.”

Carlos rolled onto his back and put his hand over his brow as if the memory was in the process of undoing him. “Madre de Dios!” he cried out to the ceiling, “I will remember the shape of that woman’s beautiful breasts until the day I die.”

I couldn’t help but a crack a smile. “So what, she just took the towels and thanked you like it was no big deal? Did she at least give you a tip?”

“My friend, what she gave me . . . ” Carlos closed his eyes and tapped his temple twice. “What she gave me is something you can’t measure in dollars and cents. But, hey.” He sat up and checked the clock on the nightstand. He seemed far too full of energy to have just come off a ten-hour shift. “It’s early enough that we can make it to the market before Señora Mendoza runs out of pan dulce and then go to the beach before the sun goes down. What do you say?”

As he leaned over to lace back up his butt-kissing shoes, I faltered.

“Are you coming or what?” Carlos asked. He jumped to standing and fiercely rubbed the palms of his hands together like a person does if he’s either standing over a fire or hatching some magnificent plan. “After what happened this morning, I’ve got a good feeling about the rest of the day. Quesitos and coffee on me.”

With so much raw hope shining from his eyes, it was impossible for me to refuse.

We shared a cab the five miles from Old San Juan to the Mercado. Once there, I followed close behind Carlos as he shouldered his way through the large crowd. Our destination was a tiny blue pushcart with a frayed giant yellow beach umbrella that sat among dozens of other fruit and vegetable stands. From the look of sheer determination on his face, you’d think Carlos was after a long-lost love rather than an eighty year-old woman selling pastries. He was convinced that Señora Mendoza, who got up at four o’clock every morning to crank up her gas oven, whip together her cheese filling, roll out layer after layer of pastry dough, and then push her cart down the street to the market, was proof that God existed and had designed our stomachs to be filled with sweets.

We were waiting in another line for coffee, our hands and mouths dusted with powdered sugar from the quesitos, when I turned at the sound of someone calling my name. It was Ruben. He was squeezing through the crowd in our direction, holding several shopping bags with one hand. In his other hand he was grasping the palm of a little girl—obviously Celia, given her resemblance to Marisol. Her dark brown hair was pulled up into two symmetrical pigtails, and she was wearing a sepia-toned sundress. As the two approached, I could see the little girl’s cinnamon eyes burning with impatience. She was a shifty one, scoping out the corners of the market as if trying to find an exit. Ruben was sweating through his white T-shirt and seemed thoroughly miserable.

“Didn’t expect to see you here,” Carlos said before taking the first bite of his second quesito and releasing a puff of white powder around his cheeks.

“Where’d you get that?” the little girl asked Carlos. “Ruben, can I . . . ?”

Ruben gripped the girl’s hand until she squealed.

“I’m stuck with Celia
all day
,” Ruben griped. “Mamá y Tía went down to Ponce. Marisol was supposed to watch her, but no one knows where she went off to.” He lifted his forearm to wipe back the short chunks of sweaty hair that were stuck to his forehead. “I was thinking she might have been with you, Luke.”

“No,” I replied. “I haven’t seen her since last night.”

“We were going to the beach,” Carlos said. “Why don’t you two come?”

Ruben shook his head. “Celia can’t swim. She’s afraid of the water.”

“Ruben, shut up!” Celia hissed.

“Es la verdad!” Ruben exclaimed. He knelt down in front of his little cousin and whispered to her in Spanish too rapid for me to understand.

“We can take turns,” I offered. “I don’t mind watching her on the beach while you guys swim. Celia and I can hunt for shells or something. We’ll dig up a present for her sister.”

Ruben swiveled his head and sized me up for a second.

“Won’t that be fun, Celia?” he asked, his enthusiasm obviously faked.

Celia didn’t respond. She’d gotten distracted by a woman and her black-and-white cattle dog performing tricks for change in the middle of the square.

“So,” Carlos said, “what are we waiting for?”

Just like in the hotel, I hesitated. The combination of the note stuffed in my pocket and not being able to get ahold of Marisol was making me more and more anxious. But I also didn’t want to come across as some possessive creep demanding to know every single move of a girl I’d just met. Ruben didn’t seem worried, just pissed that he’d been saddled with Celia.
Mari’s fine
, I told myself.
She’s with Ruth
.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Before it gets too late.”

We made our way through the more run-down neighborhood of Santurce and passed underneath a highway before hitting Avenida Ashford, the busy, upscale street where all the luxury beachfront high-rise hotels sat. During that time, Carlos told Ruben the story about the lady with the towels, going so far as to silently act the parts that he felt would be inappropriate for a seven year-old to hear. At one point Ruben was laughing so hard he had to stop and set down his bags in order to collect himself.

Once the beach was in sight, I hoisted Celia up onto my shoulders, where she gripped my chin with her chubby fingers. I twisted my head up to see her eagle eyes focused on the shore.

“There’s something wrong!” Celia shouted. She released one of her hands and pointed in the direction of the beach. “There are ambulances near the water. I can see their lights.”

Carlos, Ruben, and I shared a glance. All three of us were thinking the same thing. Someone had gone out for a late-night or early-morning swim and had fallen victim to the currents. That happened sometimes, maybe once every couple of years, but usually when the weather was much worse, causing the sea to tumble like a furious machine.

Today the sky was clear and bright, almost a postcard-perfect shade of azure.

We skirted around the side of one of the hotels and got as close to the shore as we could. Access to the beach, however, was blocked by police tape. Small crowds of locals had formed; word of mouth had worked in its typical swift and efficient way. Beyond the crowd and closer to the water, the lights of squad cars and the ambulances silently flashed. Several television reporters stood at the ready in front of their cameramen with microphones in hand. From the balconies of their sea-facing rooms, tourists pressed against the railing. Somewhere not too far away, a dog was barking.

As we merged with the rest of the onlookers, I heard some of them murmuring, praying, speculating. I lowered Celia from my shoulders, and her feet sank into the sand.

Ruben stood up on his toe-tips and raised his chin, trying to peer over the shoulders and between the heads of the people who had gotten there before us. None of us could see much.

“We can try La Andalusia,” Carlos suggested, pointing to the barely visible white shell of a high-rise with torn and faded red awnings several hundred meters down the beach. “We can probably get a better view from there. Less people.”

“Forget it,” I replied. “We’re not taking a little girl to a condemned hotel. We should probably get out of here anyway. This isn’t really the place for . . . ”

“The girl from Florida!” A man wearing khaki shorts and a white T-shirt with underarms stained with in sweat came trotting up the beach in our direction. His face was sunburned, his eyes red and rheumy.

“Hey!” A woman in mirrored sunglasses and a police badge clipped to the waist of her gray slacks stomped in the man’s direction. Her black hair was lacquered down onto her scalp and pulled back into bun so severe that it looked more like punishment than a style; her lips were painted a bold shade of matte red.

I ducked my head, hoping the woman wouldn’t notice me. It was Mara Lopez. The last time I’d seen her was a year ago, on a night I’d rather forget. She was dressed differently then, in a beat cop uniform rather than in plainclothes.

The sunburned man glanced briefly over his shoulder at the woman and then went on. “The search dogs found her. She was almost completely buried in the sand.” He stopped to catch his breath and dab his face with a red and white bandanna that he’d pulled from his back pocket. Whispers of
pobrecita
passed through the crowd.

“Move on, señor!” Mara Lopez roared, dodging the reporter who’d just materialized to shove a microphone in her face. “This is a crime scene. Leave it to the professionals.”

“Est
á
muerta?” someone shouted from the crowd.

“Let’s go, Celia,” Ruben commanded, picking up the bags he’d set down and grabbing his cousin by the arm.

“Sí,” the red-faced man lamented with a sad, slow nod. “She was probably in the water for a long time.”

“Move it!” Mara Lopez issued her command in English and again in Spanish. “We’re trying to do our jobs here.” Despite my efforts to hide, her eyes landed on mine. I saw myself—a doubled, distorted reflection—in the lenses of her glasses.

I looked away and noticed that Celia had crouched down and wedged herself between the legs of the people standing in front of us. All ten of her fingers were resting on the police tape, and she’d gone as still as a mountain, her eyes fixed on a cluster of people I assumed were more detectives near the edge of the water. They were examining something at their feet.

“Celia, now!” Ruben demanded.

“Let’s go.” I picked up Celia, and once in my arms, she wound her legs around my torso and clutched my shoulders. I followed Ruben and Carlos as they wedged themselves through the growing crowd. Together we made our way silently back up to the Avenida.

Eventually, Ruben broke the silence awkwardly: “I forgot eggs.”

“We’ll have to go back to the market,” he added. “Rico’s coming over to the house later. You guys can come, too.”

The last part of his sentence was nearly drowned out as a cop car hurtled around the corner and screamed past us in the direction of the beach.

“Do you have a sister, Lucas?” Celia asked, as I unwound her limbs from around my body and set her down.

“No. Why?”

Celia didn’t get the chance to answer because Ruben took her by the hand and dragged her back toward the market. She did, however, look over her shoulder and wave.

Carlos and I waited until they’d crossed the street and disappeared from sight before hailing a cab to take us back to the old city. During the ride, we both stared out our windows and watched the same line of gray clouds descending from the eastern sky.