The Poison Garden

by A. J. Banner

  “Wait, there, that must be his ex-wife,” I said, my pulse quickening. I glanced out the window. The road was empty. I looked back at the screen. “I’ve never seen any pictures of her.”

  The first one showed Kieran and a young, slim woman at a distance on a beach. “Looks like a nice climate. Palm trees,” Chantal said. She clicked to the next one, a closer view of Kieran on his yacht with the same woman, her hair tied back tightly in a ponytail.

  “She was beautiful,” I said.

  “Botox and breast implants.” Chantal flipped her hair back over her shoulder. She clicked through a few more shots of Kieran and his wife in various luxurious locations, in various glamorous poses. He was dressed in pastel colors, deeply tanned and fit.

  “He’s got gel in his hair,” I said. “It’s like he’s a different person.”

  “He’s a chameleon,” Chantal said.

  “Wait, stop there. The one before that.”

  She clicked back to an image of Kieran and his wife standing in a group in front of an immense Italian villa, against the backdrop of the Santa Ynez Mountains. “Zoom in,” I said. “On the faces.”

  “Looks like her family,” she said, zooming in on various people. “That must be their home or something. Looks like he married into money.”

  “But he’s so much in debt.”

  “He burned his way through the cash, maybe, if he ever got his hands on it.”

  “His wife looks thin. She didn’t look that skinny in some of the others. Go back again.”

  Chantal kept clicking back. “How much time do you want to spend on this woman? There are other folders.”

  “Just a bit longer. There’s something . . . She’s thinner in each picture, maybe?”

  “Hard to tell. Maybe she was on a diet.”

  “She died of the flu, he told me.”

  Chantal sat back and looked at me. “Is there any way you can know for sure?”

  “I’m not family—I couldn’t possibly get any medical information about her.”

  “What about a Google search?” Her fingers were already flying, and an online obituary popped up for Kieran’s wife.

  “She was only thirty when she died,” I said. “A year before he moved to the island—seven years ago. She would’ve been thirty-eight now. He’s forty.”

  “Née Lana Ellison,” Chantal read. “She was heir to her family’s fortune, made from brands of applesauce and condiments. They were philanthropists. She loved to play tennis and volunteer for local charities. This doesn’t tell us much.” She pulled up a local newspaper article about Lana, in which her distraught mother urged everyone to get their flu shots. Lana had apparently contracted the flu, her fever had spiked, and Kieran had found her unconscious on the bathroom floor and rushed her to the ER, where she died an hour later.

  “How terrible,” I said. “We should hurry now. Let’s look for—”

  “Anything with your mother’s name on it. Medical records? You’re hovering again. I can do this fast if you’re not looking over my shoulder all the time.”

  “Sorry, thank you,” I said, going into the bathroom. I could hear her tapping away on the keyboard. Kieran’s shaving brush and razor sat on the tile countertop next to the sink, and I could smell the peppermint soap he loved. Funny, I thought, the way we know certain intimate things about people we love, or have loved, and yet maybe we never know them at all.

  “Here we go.” She motioned me back into the room. “These are downloaded files, letters, not records.” She opened the first letter from a research center on the East Coast, dated only a couple of weeks before my mother’s death.

  “She was accepted into the experimental trial,” I said. “Brandon was right. The treatment involved injecting modified immune cells into the tumor . . . It could have halted the growth of her tumors for several months, or even years.”

  “Here’s another letter,” she said, clicking to open another file. “This one gives her instructions for arriving at the research center and outlines some of the preliminary tests she would have to undergo. Looks like she was on track to enter the trial.”

  I sat on the bed, my legs weak, my arms heavy at my sides. A cold wind blew through me. “Why didn’t he tell me? Do you think she even saw the letters?”

  “Probably not.” Chantal glanced out the window, then back at the screen. “I’ll copy those documents to the USB drive, and then we should get going. I’m nervous.”

  “Me, too,” I said, twisting my hands in my lap. “Thank you for doing this.”

  She tapped away, while I sat with my head in my hands. She stopped, staring at the screen.

  “What is it?” I said, jumping up to look over her shoulder. She was opening and closing windows at lightning speed.

  “He didn’t clear the cache on his browser,” she said. “He was looking at luxury property listings from a high-end real estate firm in Seattle. He made these pages his favorites.”

  “He can’t afford these homes,” I said. Unless he were to inherit my estate. I began to feel sick to my stomach again.

  “He likes expensive houses. Not a crime, but . . . surprising.” She had a peculiar look on her face.

  “Did he look up anything else? Like methods of murder? How to dispose of a body?” I laughed nervously.

  “I don’t know what he searched for before the real estate. He cleared his browsing history.”

  As if he had something to hide, I thought, nausea rising inside me. As she shut down the computer, the bile rose in my throat, and I barely made it to the bathroom before I threw up into the toilet.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Chantal stood on her porch and waved goodbye to Elise. The poor thing was fighting the flu, or maybe just sick from the loss of her hopes, her shattered illusions. Nothing to be done. Chantal had tried to help. They had gleaned so much from Kieran’s computer, and from the files and photographs he had so casually left on his hard drive in a flotsam of disorganization.

  After Elise’s car disappeared around the bend, Chantal went around to the backyard, carried two pots of blooming black-eyed Susans to her Kia, and put them into the back seat. Rudbeckia fulgida, Selene had called them. Elise’s mother had known the scientific names for just about every flower under the sun.

  Then Chantal wrote a note to Jenny and drove the flowers to the graveyard, planted them around Jenny’s headstone. She wiped the granite clean. Below the name, Jennifer Gittner, and her birth and death dates, the epitaph read, JUST WHISPER MY NAME IN YOUR HEART, AND I WILL BE THERE.

  But Jenny had not come to Chantal, as often and fervently as she had whispered her daughter’s name. The stones in the cemetery were a cruel joke. They did not mark where a spirit could be found. Jenny was everywhere. She was in the sea, in the clouds, in the leaves, in the squirrels scampering through the garden. She was in Chantal’s memory, coming to the surface at any slight trigger—the sight of a baby in a stroller, conjuring the time Jenny had dropped her Binky down the storm drain on Waterfront Road.

  Whenever Chantal passed a neighbor’s garden full of fluffy, free-roaming hens, she remembered the time when Jenny, at eight or nine, had hugged a hen named Hannah, said, “I love chickens”—and never eaten meat again. How could such a compassionate light ever be extinguished?

  Jenny would be born again in another form—her love could not die. So many times, Chantal had seen signs in the flap of a hawk’s wing, in the hovering iridescent hummingbirds at the fuchsia plants.

  Chantal placed her folded note beneath a rock on the grave, another reply to the note her daughter had left behind, when she had expressed her despair. She had written a list of items with instructions about who would get what. The decision to walk into the ocean had given her relief. Nothing was ever clearer to me. I’m at peace.

  Neither Chantal nor Bill had understood the depth of her sadness, although they had sensed her depression. She hadn’t been eating much, had been rude and sullen. The psychotherapist had diagnosed reactive depression. But t
hey never knew what she’d been reacting to, and she had missed her last two appointments.

  Nick, two years older, had been clueless, already planning his departure to Korea. He had always dreamed of traveling. Chantal missed him with a sharp pain—Skyping was never enough, but it was better than nothing. She understood why he didn’t want to come back to the memories.

  Chantal, on the other hand, lived inside them. She often tried to understand what it must’ve been like for Jenny to slip into unconsciousness as she sank into the cold water. She had imagined wading in to be with her daughter. So many times, she had played back the events of that morning. She should have woken earlier. Should have checked Jenny’s room. Should have gone looking for her.

  Chantal sat for a time on the bench next to the grave, feeling the rain in her hair, dampening her face, her clothes. She talked to Jenny, and then she walked down the path to Mike’s grave. Her first husband’s headstone was off by itself, covered in moss, weeds growing up over the plot. He was Jenny’s biological father, but Jenny didn’t remember much about him. He’d died when she was only three years old. But Nick had been five. He remembered—and he was far away now.

  Chantal had not buried Jenny near Mike. She rarely came this far into the cemetery. Strangely, the closer she got to him, the tighter her muscles became, the less she could breathe. There was another bench here, older, well-worn wood. “You’re the reason for everything I do now,” she said to him. “Even though you are dead. You were too young, I know.” She sat on the bench, talking to him as she often did. He knew, for example, that she had moved away from the island with the kids, soon after his death. She had learned computer programming on the mainland, had started again, away from memories. He knew she had met Bill, had married him. He knew that Bill had been a loving stepfather to Jenny and Nick. He knew that she and Bill had moved back to the island for the slower pace, when Jenny got depressed and started missing school. They’d thought she would be happier here. “I did my best,” Chantal told Mike. “But it wasn’t enough. And now there is all of this going on. And I need to do something about it.” She sat there, telling a dead man the details of her plans.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I stood beneath the stark bathroom bulb, staring at the telltale blue lines on the pregnancy test stick. I felt myself tumbling headlong into an abyss. Now what? Now what? This couldn’t be happening—the timing couldn’t have been worse. It was the universe laughing at me, showing me again that I was never in control.

  After I’d dropped Chantal at home, I’d raced down to the pharmacy to buy the set of two pregnancy tests. I hadn’t recognized the clerk behind the counter, but she had smiled at me and said, “Hello, Mrs. Lund.” Damn it, I’d thought. I’d looked up to see Lily Kim, owner of the shop, waving at me from behind the pharmacy counter. She had offered me a job when I’d first returned to the island, but I had declined, knowing she didn’t need another pharmacist and probably couldn’t afford to hire one. But she had loved my mother. I’d been grateful for her gesture of goodwill, but this time, I hadn’t stayed around to chat. I’d run out of the store, hoping Lily Kim and her employee would not gossip about what I had bought.

  When I’d arrived home, Brandon had finished installing the locks and had left the keys under the mat. I’d run upstairs, torn open the tests. Each one yielded a positive result. I didn’t have room for this, for the confirmation of what I had feared when I’d vomited into the toilet at Kieran’s farmhouse. I gripped the handle of the second plastic stick between my forefinger and thumb, staring at it, my body tense. I should have known. I should have suspected. The irritability, nausea.

  The calendar should have given me a clue, too, the number of weeks that had passed since my last period—nearly seven. But sometimes I skipped periods. It was not unusual. My rhythm had always been erratic, and Brandon and I had tried so hard, for so long, never succeeding, that somehow I’d thought I could never conceive.

  But, of course, that had been a false assumption, since Brandon had been the source of our problem. Now here was the proof, the result I’d always hoped for—yet I dreaded having to tell Kieran I was pregnant. Maybe I never would. But the baby was his. He would be forever tied to his offspring, to me. Would the child turn out like him? A liar or worse? I had no idea.

  I threw the pregnancy test stick into the garbage with the other one. No matter what, now I had another life inside me to protect. Everything of mine would become my child’s. Everything was different now. The child would need me, would need a safe and happy life.

  My mind raced ahead. I needed to buy baby clothes, convert the guest room into a nursery. Add this to my conversation with my attorney when he called me back. Call my ob-gyn in the city, Dr. Gupta, make an appointment. Schedule an ultrasound, blood tests. Take prenatal vitamins. Stop drinking caffeine—when had I last had a cup of coffee? I’d drunk herbal tea that morning. When had I last taken any kind of over-the-counter medication? I couldn’t remember. I hadn’t drunk any alcohol—no whisky or wine—not recently, anyway, but I’d inhaled Diane’s cigarette smoke, which now enraged me. How dare she? I wanted her to disappear from the face of the earth. She had contaminated my house, my lungs, my baby. I had been pregnant when I’d come home from the city—and before I’d left. For a few weeks now.

  In my childhood bed, I crossed my arms over my abdomen, curled up in the fetal position. Kieran had a right to know, but he would use the baby as an excuse to cajole his way back into the house—for what purpose? Did he love me, or did he simply want my money?

  If only none of this had happened. In my original conception of him, he would’ve been a great father. His young patients loved him. He made them feel at ease. He was playful, fun. But now I knew he was disloyal and possibly worse. He could threaten me and my baby. After what we’d found in his computer, the worst possibilities coalesced in my mind. Kieran had possibly hastened my mother’s death by preventing her from entering the experimental trial. What else to make of those letters? And why had he done it? It had to be money. Triggering my inheritance. Then there would be only my death to wait for—or hasten. The long game.

  Give me the answers, I thought to my mother. How do I get through this? Did you plan to enter that clinical trial? Or did Kieran stop you? Did he lie to you?

  I got up, went downstairs to make a sandwich, but I barely tasted what I was eating. Outside the kitchen window, a pileated woodpecker hammered away at a dead fir snag, poking holes in the bark, its red crest brilliant in the light. The bird was a female. Her forehead was black. The male has a red forehead, Kieran had told me. The binoculars he’d given me sat on the windowsill—it was so difficult to believe that we had done something as innocuous as watch birds together, that I had believed nothing bad could happen between us.

  As the light faded into evening, I went upstairs to change into pajamas. When in doubt, try to sleep, my mother had told me when I was young. Everything is always clearer in the morning. And I knew Kieran could not get into the house since I’d changed the locks. I had not told him.

  It took me a while to fall asleep, my mind spinning—I need to protect myself, my baby. I was unsure when, but I fell asleep and woke outside in the front garden, still in my pajamas, shivering. A strip of orange lit the eastern horizon.

  I spun around, breathing fast. What was I doing out here? I could smell the leaves, feel the cold, wet ground squishing between my bare toes. I hadn’t put on my slippers. My teeth chattered. The silhouettes of bushes and trees brushed against the sky. I couldn’t remember descending the stairs, walking outside. The previous morning, I’d slid my feet into my slippers. They’d been damp, but I hadn’t paid attention. And Kieran said he’d seen me coming back from the cottage early in the morning, before I’d left for the city. I’d done it again. Walked in my sleep.

  I could hear a voice, the bang of a door. Someone was calling for me. Brandon.

  “What’s going on? Elise, are you okay?” He ran up to me from the driveway, dressed in his bulk
y canvas work pants and jacket.

  “I was just . . . checking the garden. I thought I heard something. What are you doing here?”

  “Getting an early start on the deck before I head to the construction site.”

  “No, here, at my house. What are you doing here?” My voice came out raspy, and I tried to clear the cobwebs from my brain.

  “I was headed this way anyway. I came to check on you. It’s a big deal, changing the locks. I was worried about you.”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” I said absentmindedly.

  “You were sleepwalking again, weren’t you?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “I meant to be outside.”

  “Barefoot?” He frowned.

  “I was in a hurry . . . I heard a noise.”

  I followed his gaze toward the cottage. The lights were on, the door slightly ajar. I rushed inside, and he followed. I tried to remember coming out here. The front room was a mess, as if I’d tried to rearrange the displays in my sleep, with no sense of logic.

  “You heard something out here?” Brandon said. “Should I call the cops? Was this a break-in?” He whipped his cell phone out of his pocket.

  “No, don’t call anyone,” I said, heading into the prep room. “I think it was me. I came out here in my sleep.”

  “Shit, Elise. Not again. What if you’d gotten lost or walked all the way to the ocean?”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  The truth was, I didn’t. “I guess I’m under stress,” I said.

  “Chantal mentioned you and your husband—”

  “We’re fine. Don’t go there, please.” Behind the counter, in the prep room, my mother’s row of cloth journals had tipped over again like dominoes.

  The weigh scale sat on the table, a dusting of powder on top. Right behind the scale, a bag labeled SLUMBER had fallen off the shelf. I returned the bag to the shelf.