The Poison Garden

by A. J. Banner

  “It’s the truth,” Brandon said. “I swear. I found him here. He wasn’t stiff yet, but he was not breathing.” His face went pale, his lips trembling.

  The rain misted sideways, but I hardly felt it. “Where is he? Did you try to resuscitate him?”

  “I did, but I couldn’t bring him back. I tried CPR, everything. Just like you did.” Brandon’s voice broke. “But he was too far gone—”

  “We need to find him, get him back. Where is he?”

  “It won’t make any difference. He’s floating out to sea.”

  “What?” I leaped to my feet. “Where?”

  “I carried him in a large duffel bag.”

  “No—how could you? You couldn’t carry him!”

  “Do you know how much I’ve been bench-pressing? Your husband was not a big man. I put him in a duffel bag and carried him onto the docks.”

  “Nobody could do that!”

  “Kieran’s weight was a deadlift. One sixty-five, one seventy. Awkwardly distributed, but still: easy. I pulled up my hood. I put him in the dinghy. I had a hell of a time getting him out of the damn bag, but I did it.”

  “Stop,” I said, gasping. “You’re making this up.”

  “All I had to do was untie the line and throw it into the dinghy with him. Then I stood on the ladder, on the yacht, and I gave the dinghy a good kick.”

  “This isn’t true,” I said, my teeth chattering.

  “He was lying there in the bottom, with his head against the rubber side. . . That slip is at the very end of the dock. I was pretty sure the dinghy wouldn’t hit anything on its way out between the jetties.”

  “This can’t be happening,” I said faintly. My limbs grew heavy again, my face damp in the rain. “Don’t do this. Don’t lie. Kieran rowed away. He went out there on his own. He got up and found his way to the harbor—”

  “No,” Brandon said firmly. “He was dead. The dinghy caught the outgoing tide and moved away fast.”

  The oxygen drained out of my lungs. My body, my mind, felt poisoned. “This is not real.” But I knew, by the way he spoke, that he told the truth. He had carried Kieran’s body out onto the slip like luggage over his shoulder.

  I was trembling violently now. My bones felt as if they were disintegrating. “Why did you do this? It’s not possible.”

  “Anything is possible for the woman I love.” Brandon gave me that intense look of pure devotion. The look he had always given me.

  “You should’ve called for help. You didn’t even try!” I ran inside the house. The warmth enveloped me.

  Brandon followed, maneuvered himself in the hall to block my path.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I need to find him.”

  “What are you going to do—search the whole ocean? He’s gone.”

  “You said the dinghy drifted with the outgoing tide. The Coast Guard will find him. I’ll tell them what I did. I have to.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  “Why not?” I screamed. “You should’ve tried to help him!”

  “Keep your voice down,” Brandon said.

  “Nobody can hear us! And I don’t care anyway.” I ran to the front closet for my coat, but he stopped me again, grabbing my arm before I could open the front door.

  “If you go to the Coast Guard, and they find him, you will end up in prison, and your baby will be born there. Is that what you want?”

  My ribs constricted, compressing my lungs, as if I were diving deep underwater. I gasped for breath, wrenched out of his grip. “How do I know you didn’t kill him? I was unconscious. You could be making all of this up.”

  “I’m not. You did it. The powder was everywhere in the cottage, and you know it. I didn’t have time to clean it up.”

  I narrowed my gaze at him, desperately reaching for a different explanation. “What were you doing here in the first place?”

  “I was next door working for Chantal. I got there early, like I always do, before heading over to the construction site. I saw the light on in your shop. I came up here and found you unconscious.”

  “Why didn’t you try to wake me? You let me lie there—”

  “I checked your vital signs. You were all right. You were responsive,” he said, his face flushing. He slowed his voice as if speaking to a child. “I was going to revive you, but I had to make a judgment call. I could see what you’d done. The door was wide open. The light was on. So I went in. I’d just found your husband dead on the ground, and you were lying unconscious on the path. I thought someone had assaulted both of you. I thought the perp might be in the shop. But you know what I found? All the crap you use to make your magical formulas.”

  “I didn’t know what I was doing,” I said, numb. “That’s what I’ll say because it’s the truth.”

  “You will be confessing to murder, and I’ll be an accomplice. Nobody will believe you were asleep doing something so complicated. Do you want this to become a huge deal? You’ll be in the news, a murderer with a fake ‘sleepwalking defense.’ Do you want that for your child?”

  My lips were numb, my hands tingling. My lungs wouldn’t fill with air. I should’ve felt happy that Kieran was dead—but instead, remorse welled up in me. “You should’ve let things be,” I said, my gut roiling.

  “How could I? I figured you would wake up with a hell of a headache. But the alternative would’ve been worse.”

  I buried my head in my hands, then a thought occurred to me. A hope. I grasped on to its fragile thread. “You could’ve been the one who used the powder—you could’ve killed him and disposed of his body.”

  He flinched, a look of deep shock crossing his face. His jaw twitched. “Do you really believe that? I’ve never walked in my sleep.”

  “You weren’t sleeping.”

  “I came here to help you. He was already dead. I can prove it, but you know what? You’re right. I should’ve left the body here. I was right to leave you on the ground unconscious. I’m out of here.” He flung open the door and strode out, disappearing around the side of the house toward his truck.

  “Wait!” I shouted. “Wait. Wait.” I ran after him, the door slamming after me, my heart thumping against my rib cage. The rain had stopped.

  He stood motionless next to the driver’s side of his truck. “What?” He didn’t look at me.

  “You said you can prove it. How?”

  He pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “It’s not going to make you happy.”

  “I don’t care. Show me.”

  Brandon stood next to me, leaning against the wind, and scrolled through photographs on his phone. He stopped at a video. He held his phone in front of me, hit the “Play” button. Birds chirped in the background, the wind in the trees. The light of morning leaked from the sky. Shadows moved over Kieran’s pale, unmoving face, lying in the garden exactly where I had found him.

  The phone jiggled, the angle awkward, the video taken from above. Brandon’s breathless voice came through in the background. “What happened here?” he was saying in the video. “I’m documenting what I’m finding. Dr. Kieran Lund appears to be dead.” I watched in growing horror. It had been real. He had been lying there. His lips bluish, his eyes half-closed, staring upward.

  “Dr. Lund, talk to me!” He slapped Kieran’s face, no response. The camera turned sideways. “Checking for breath. Nothing. No pulse. Starting CPR. I need to call—Elise!”

  I gasped as the video kept going—he was trying to save Kieran. “And his wife, Elise Watters, appears to be knocked out cold.”

  “Stop,” I said. “You took video, but you didn’t get help!”

  He turned off the video, tucked the phone back into his pocket. “I was going to make the call. But then I thought, the police would still find evidence, even after I covered for you. They would still know what had happened. You’d left the damn coffee mugs inside with coffee still in them.”

  The color leached out of the sky, my head emptying. “So I did see co
ffee mugs this morning. I thought someone else had been here.”

  “Who would have been here?” he said, looking at me strangely, as if I had transformed into some kind of monster. “I cleaned them, but I had to move Kieran fast. I had to leave the shop the way it was.”

  “Why did you make the video?” I said, in shock.

  “In case I needed to show it to someone—to you, to prove my point.” He swiped through to the next video, which showed him entering the cottage, finding the powder. “This could be toxic,” he was saying in the video. The camera swung around to face the ceiling and ended.

  I’m a murderer, I thought, the word murderer floating in the air.

  “Try to calm down,” he said. “Try to breathe. You’re hyperventilating.”

  What I had apparently done could not be undone, but I needed to see Kieran’s body, to retrieve him. To go to the police. “We still need to get him back.”

  “I told you. The dinghy drifted way the hell out there.”

  I ran back into the house, Brandon close on my heels. I grabbed my car keys. “I have to go.”

  “It’s too late now. Report him missing tomorrow. Say he went fishing and didn’t come back.” Brandon gripped my shoulders, his fingernails digging into my flesh.

  “I’m not going to lie,” I said. “They’ll have to believe me. I was asleep.”

  “But what about me? I had to make a split-second decision. I saved your life, your future.”

  “I never asked you to do that!”

  “You didn’t have to ask! Don’t you see?” He stared at me, his expression singular, intense. “I had to help you. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Why do you think I keep coming back to the island?” He kneeled in front of me, looking into my eyes, holding my arms so tightly I thought he would break my bones.

  I looked down at my fists, the keys clenched in one hand. His fingers were cutting off my circulation. “You’ve made everything worse.” Kieran had been right about Brandon. He kept returning to the island because of me.

  “He was dead. He’s not going to be any less dead when the storm passes.”

  “We have to tell the Coast Guard exactly what time it was when you set the dinghy adrift, and which direction it was going. I’ll tell them it wasn’t you. It was me.”

  He got up and looked down at me. “They’re not going to believe that. You can’t lift a body. Let this go. If he’s never found, you didn’t do anything. Even if he is found. He’s drifting with the currents.”

  “We need to get him.” I wrenched away from him, burst out onto the porch, into the wind.

  Brandon came out after me. “It’s too late. Why can’t you accept that?”

  I looked through the trees at the whitecaps churning up the sea. “I’m going. You can’t talk me out of it.”

  “The police will figure out that you hated him. They’ll find out about the affair. It’s obvious!”

  “I wouldn’t kill anyone because of an affair.”

  “The police don’t know that.”

  “I was asleep.” I rubbed my hands along my cheeks. “Everything was weighing on me. The Juliet, the journal . . .”

  Brandon’s eyes sharpened. “The journal I found under the cabinet?”

  I nodded toward the cottage. “I read it. She was scared of him. There were formulas for the powder . . . She wrote in the journal . . .”

  “It will only implicate you even more.”

  I turned to face him. “Why would the journal implicate me?”

  “It gives you motive for murder,” he said. “Revenge for what he did to your mother. You said so yourself.”

  “But . . .” No, I didn’t, I thought. I didn’t say anything about the journal before now.

  “Think about it! Your mother even wrote about him. She said he would kill her for sure. Why wouldn’t you want revenge?”

  How could he know she’d thought Kieran might kill her? “I did, I do,” I said. “But the journal is not—”

  He jabbed his finger at me, his eyes bright and manic. “You said it yourself. She wrote, If I die now, it was not an accident. The guy doesn’t deserve to have anyone go to prison for him, least of all you.”

  My lungs constricted, tremors reverberating through me. A strange ringing in my ears. I had not shown my mother’s journal to him after he had retrieved it. I’d carried the journal downtown to the precinct, then I’d brought it home and locked it in a drawer in the cottage. How could Brandon have quoted from it? If he had found it on the floor, if he had not seen it before that moment, how could he possibly have known the exact words she had written inside?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I turned away from Brandon, dashed toward my car, but he blocked my path. “Let me go,” I said.

  “Hey, take it easy.” He tried to grab me, but I ducked away, charged toward my car again, but he was right there in front of me. He was too quick for such a big man.

  “Leave me alone,” I said. “I need to go. Now.”

  “I can’t let you just leave. I won’t. You’ll get into an accident if you try to drive. You need to calm down.”

  Panic rose inside me. How could I escape this man? If I tried to hit him, he would grab my arm, maybe even break my bones. I couldn’t run. He would catch up. He could move fast enough to stop me. What else could I do? Deflect him, outwit him? But how? Try to reason with him? He was smart enough to suspect a bluff. I had to pretend I was not trying to flee from him. Hide the shock on my face. What if I could slow him down? Incapacitate him? The Slumber powder.

  “You’re right,” I said, feigning weariness. “I am a little . . . stressed. I’ll make some tea. I’ve got a calming raspberry blend . . . in the shop.”

  “Fine,” he said, nodding toward the cottage. “Let’s go.”

  By the time I had reached the entrance, I had rearranged my features into a bland expression, belying my inner turmoil. Inside the cottage, I pretended to struggle to find the tea in the prep room. Brandon stood there watching me as I searched for the Slumber powder and tried to devise a way to get it into the drink I’d make him. But the Slumber—there was no sign of it. A wave of panic broke over me before I remembered I’d taken it into the kitchen, hidden it up in the cabinet behind the coffee and tea. How would I get in there, get the powder into his tea? He didn’t even drink tea.

  I made myself take a breath. Another. One step at a time.

  “You okay?” Brandon asked, walking around the shop, picking up bottles, reading the labels.

  “I’m thinking about all this,” I said. “He’s gone for good, right?”

  “Right,” he said, examining bottles of lotion on the shelves.

  “I’m not in danger from him anymore.”

  “No, never again.” He looked at me, his shoulders relaxing. I could sense his relief.

  “Good, I’m glad.” It occurred to me to test the drawer in which I had hidden the journal. It was still locked. So how had Brandon read the pages? He must’ve been inside the cottage earlier. He must’ve planted the journal on the floor under the cabinet, must have read it before he ever showed it to me. But for what purpose? He could not have read the pages at any time after he’d handed the journal to me. After reading it in the library in the main house, I’d always had it with me before I’d locked it in the drawer.

  I wondered if he realized what he’d done, that he had quoted my mother’s exact words to me, words I had not told him.

  “You can relax,” he said. “Even if they do find him, they won’t know what happened to him.”

  “Why is that?” I said, keeping my breathing steady.

  “Well, your mom told me about the plant, too, once when I was over here fixing the light switches. She was pulling out this beautiful flower. I asked her why, and she said if you ate it, you could keel over, and nobody would ever know what killed you.”

  I had no way to know if he was lying, or if he had read all of her journals. I pictured him in the shop, taking his time flipping through the pages
. Finding the information he needed to . . . What? Do away with my husband? If he’d read my mother’s dark musings about Kieran, about her fears, he could’ve come to me directly, could’ve shown me the journal and let me make up my mind.

  Why had I trusted Brandon to change the locks? Because I’d been married to him for four years, because he’d never done anything this extreme. I’d found the journals tipped over earlier, but I’d thought they had merely slipped and fallen like dominoes. All of these thoughts raced through my mind at lightning speed, the dots connecting.

  “So I could let things be,” I said slowly. “He went off in his dinghy to go fishing, and he never came back.”

  “That’s what happened,” he said.

  “He took off to clear his head, after we fought.”

  “You could say he was angry. He was having an affair. You caught him. You argued.”

  I went through the motions of filling the plug-in kettle with water, turning it on, trying to keep my fingers from trembling too much. “That’s what I would say—because that’s what happened, right? I woke up and he was gone. He sometimes went out on his own. Not so much recently. But before we were married, he used to take off.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  I opened a cabinet above the counter, brought out a blend of raspberry tea leaves, placed them in an infusion ball in a ceramic teapot, hardly noticing what I was doing. I had an idea for getting to the Slumber—and getting it into Brandon.

  Brandon was still looking at me placidly. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said, sitting on a stool at the counter.

  “I’m just trying to wrap my mind around all this.”

  His brow furrowed. “I’ll stay here to make sure you’re all right.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be all right?”

  “I’ve just confirmed that you killed your husband in your sleep.” That unwavering, sincere gaze. “It will take time to sink in. You need me here. In case you do something you might regret.” I could tell, by his posture, that he was not going to leave. He never had been the one to go, from the beginning. Any time anyone had walked out of a room, it had been me.