Last Run

by Hilary Norman

‘Hard is not the word,’ Grace said.

  ‘What if it had been Cathy?’ Lucia asked. ‘Don’t you think you might have done the same thing for her?’

  ‘No,’ Grace said. ‘I would not. I’ve asked myself how far I might go for my child, my children, and I expect there are many unthinkable things I might do.’ She shook her head. ‘But not that. Ever.’

  ‘No,’ Lucia said. ‘I thought that was what you’d say.’

  Chapter Thirty-three

  ‘No chance,’ Martinez told Sam, who h ad just asked him if he could get to Lucia Busseto’s house before him. ‘It’s not just Kovac and Hernandez on my case now, it’s the chief, too, and—’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Sam cut in.

  ‘I’m already worried, man,’ Martinez told him.

  ‘I’ll stay in touch,’ Sam said, and cut off.

  His partner’s first, predictable reaction had been to tell him to call in the Key Biscayne PD – ‘haven’t you learned anything yet, for fuck’s sake?’ – but moments later, Martinez had agreed how tough it would be, on short notice, to explain wholly unsubstantiated suspicions against an apparently blameless widow. And in any case, no matter what might be going on inside the house, if they did send over a couple of regular patrol officers, who was to say they might not just get fobbed off by Lucia?

  Terri would go if he called her, whatever she felt about him. If he told that one-woman taskforce that Lucia might be Kez’s aunt, she’d burn rubber getting down to the Busseto house, no question. Which really would spell the end of her career ambitions, and might just end up placing her in danger too.

  Sam put his foot down again, all the way down.

  ‘This must be a horrible jolt for you,’ Lucia said. ‘All these years of sitting in your nice, cosy office listening to patients, thinking you’re helping them. Yet really you have no idea, have you?’

  ‘Sometimes that’s true,’ Grace said, evenly.

  ‘Quite a lot of times,’ Lucia said. ‘You’ve sat with me in that room for over two years, drunk my tea, thanked me for my work, remembered to ask polite questions about Tina and about what I did at the weekend. But you never had the slightest inkling of my pain, of the awful spiral I’d been sucked down into.’

  It was the first time Grace had been fully aware of the other woman’s hostility towards her.

  ‘More tea,’ Lucia said, got up and went into the house.

  Grace looked down at her teacup.

  Remembered Lucia calling it her ‘special’.

  Grace looked around at the plants. Everywhere, inside the house and out, and in the glasshouse. Lucia had said that many of them were poisonous, that she’d considered using foxglove to kill her husband before she’d settled on his own digitalis.

  Gregory had been killed by cocaine cut with strychnine. Grace struggled to remember if strychnine came from a plant. Then remembered that rat poison had been used. Not a plant.

  So take it easy, she told herself. Don’t get crazy.

  She reminded herself how bad she’d felt six years ago when she’d had cause to suspect that she’d been poisoned; how they were never certain afterwards if she hadn’t totally imagined her symptoms.

  This nausea was probably her imagination, too. Because this was still Lucia, wasn’t it, who had always been kind to her and her patients. And maybe the grotesque tales had affected her mind; maybe she had only thought that Lucia was being hostile just now. After all, Lucia had been unburdening herself to Grace because she trusted her, the way Cathy said Kez had trusted her, which was, in its way, a compliment.

  Except this was not the Lucia she had thought she knew.

  And Grace did feel bad. Less dizzy now, but still unwell.

  You felt bad yesterday, too, without Lucia’s tea.

  Nearly eight months pregnant and going through this was enough to make any woman feel bad.

  But just in case, no more tea.

  Lucia was in the kitchen making more.

  That didn’t mean she had to drink it.

  Grace thought of her phone again, decided this was the moment to get it, and started to get up.

  Lucia came out, holding two cups.

  She set one down in front of Grace, moved the used one to a table near the glasshouse, and there was a dish of red and black jellybeans on that, and a jug of water, and more plants, all in white pots.

  ‘Nicer when it’s hot,’ she said.

  Cathy was all talked out.

  Drained of facts, details, recollection. Of strength. Of emotion, especially.

  They had all continued to be kind to her, had told her several times that she could stop, take more breaks, go home and continue another time, but Cathy had wanted to get it done with. And the kindness seemed to indicate that Sam’s and Grace’s anxiety about her past counting against her was unfounded.

  These people had, she supposed, found her guilty of being a lousy judge of character. Of being a fool and, maybe, some kind of a freak, an oddball.

  Right on all counts, she thought. It all seemed completely unreal to her. All that had happened, including her relationship with Kez. The deaths and the pain Kez had left in her wake. The strangeness of her long day of confession. Sam’s and Terri’s shooting.

  Kez dying in her arms. Kez loving her.

  Cathy had talked and talked about so much of it; yet, on an emotional level it was as if it had never happened. She knew from experience that the numbness was just a temporary comfort device offered by her brain, a smudging of pain; knew it would not last. But for the present, she was emotionally spent.

  There would be more, she realized, much more to deal with and face up to over time. More interviews, more statements, more poking into her privacy. More prodding of her relationship with Kez.

  Going home and seeing Saul – who would probably, knowing him, forgive her. Her family would all forgive her, which might be hard to take. Grace and David, concerned for her, assuring her they’d be there for her whenever she was ready. Sam checking every now and again, with wary eyes, to see if she did not, after all, blame him for killing Kez.

  All the kindness might just make it worse, though she couldn’t be sure of that.

  Couldn’t be sure of anything.

  Except that beneath the exhaustion and temporary emotional paralysis, she was deeply afraid of certain things.

  That Kez had only been drawn to her because of her past.

  That love of the intimate kind was not for her, because she was somehow flawed.

  That people took a risk by loving her.

  That she might never be able to feel, properly, intensely, again.

  Worse, that she would feel again.

  ‘I was there,’ Lucia said. ‘In Naples.’

  A small white boat, with a woman at the helm, deep-bronzed, a pair of sunglasses pushed up into her glossy golden hair, moved sedately past the Christina, stirring her and sending small waves bumping up her sides.

  ‘I saw what happened,’ Lucia went on. ‘What they did to Kez.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ Grace was appalled. ‘Oh God, Lucia, I’m so sorry.’

  And she was, despite everything, and it was extraordinary how compassion could return so speedily, even if her heart was pounding crazily at the same time and fear was already pushing the sympathy away again.

  ‘Saul’s young lady and Detective Becket,’ Lucia said.

  No mistaking the hostility now. Though how, thinking of Sam’s briefly sketched account of the events leading up to Kez’s death, how could this woman not feel hostile?

  ‘I’m sorry, too,’ Lucia said. ‘Truly sorry. For Cathy and for Saul. I’ve prayed for his recovery, for him to be able to go on with his training. And I can even understand what his girlfriend and your husband did, why they did it – I suppose, in a way, I can understand that better than anyone.’

  She drank from her cup, then set it down.

  ‘But I can’t ever forgive them,’ she said.

  ‘They were protecting Cathy,’ Grace said
.

  ‘Maybe that’s what they believed they were doing,’ Lucia said. ‘But no one’s ever going to know for sure, are they, that Cathy needed protection. And if Kez was such a great danger to her, why was Cathy on her knees beside Kez when she fell? Why was Cathy weeping over my niece as she lay there dying?’

  ‘Because she cared for her,’ Grace said, ‘very much.’

  ‘At least she was able to be there for her at the end.’

  Grace saw, heard, the bitterness.

  ‘Why didn’t you go to her, Lucia?’ It was her turn to challenge, quietly. ‘If you were there, if you knew it was all over, if there was nothing more you could do to shield Kez, why didn’t you show yourself, admit to your relationship there and then?’ She knew she was taking another risk, found she didn’t care, wanted an answer. ‘Why did you leave Naples and come back here?’

  ‘Because there were things I still had to do for her,’ Lucia answered.

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Private things.’

  She looked down at Grace’s teacup.

  ‘You haven’t drunk your tea, doctor.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Afraid I might have added something?’ Lucia asked.

  ‘It has occurred to me,’ Grace replied.

  ‘Plenty to choose from.’ Lucia indicated the plants and glasshouse. ‘Nux vomica. I’m sure you’ve heard of that.’

  ‘Yes, I have,’ Grace said.

  Her heart was pumping even harder now, too hard, she thought, and although they’d been sitting in the shade, she was starting to perspire. What she needed, really needed, right now was to get up and walk away while she still could. Off this deck, back through the white house, back to her car.

  She thought of Greg again, and her stomach tightened with rage and sorrow.

  Unfinished business.

  ‘I believe,’ she said, ‘that nux vomica contains strychnine.’

  ‘Not what I used to kill poor Gregory.’ Lucia read the logical progression of Grace’s thoughts. ‘But you know that already. Ordinary rat poison was easier and more effective.’ She looked around. ‘All this at my fingertips and I used common rat poison.’ She gestured at the glasshouse again. ‘Quite a good collection. A kind of fascination, I suppose, rather than a hobby. Not quite an obsession, though.’

  ‘How long have you been practising?’ Grace asked.

  ‘I began some time after Christina died. Nature’s own pharmacy and death dispensary, and no child any more to be lured by or harmed by them, and many of the plants so pretty.’ Lucia paused. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like a closer look?’

  ‘Not really,’ Grace said.

  ‘I love their names, too.’ Lucia’s eyes glinted a little. ‘Winter aconite and dumbcane and nightshade and henbane and rosary pea and angel’s trumpet and hemlock – and I have my very own cocoa plant – and do you know, Grace, that tea made from mistletoe berries has killed people—’

  ‘Lucia, I don’t—

  ‘Or that rhododendrons can paralyse, or that peach stones contain cyanide?’

  ‘Yes.’ Grace felt steadier, suddenly, in the face of something more clearly recognizable now as a psychiatric illness. ‘Apricot kernels, too, if I’m not mistaken?’

  Lucia smiled at her, an odd, sad little smile. ‘You’re not really afraid of me any more, are you, Grace?’ She paused. ‘You were for a little while, but not now.’

  ‘Not really,’ Grace said, and found that it was true.

  In her womb her baby kicked, and her right hand moved to cover it.

  Lucia smiled again. That same, sad smile.

  ‘You’re right not to be afraid,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t harm your child.’ The smile twisted, wry and painful. ‘I’ve harmed enough children already, God forgive me.’

  She rose from her chair and moved swiftly to the table beside the glasshouse.

  Dipped the fingers of her right hand into the bowl of jellybeans, extracted three or four, put them into her mouth –

  Grace saw the oddness of her movements.

  Lucia’s lips clamped tightly shut, one hand over her mouth, the other gripping the edge of the table, white-knuckled as she bit down hard, and cried out involuntarily.

  Not jellybeans.

  ‘No!’ Grace cried out.

  Lucia’s face was a grimacing mask as she chewed violently, then moaned again.

  Grace struggled to her feet. ‘Lucia, no!’

  The older woman was already down on her knees, that hand still pressed over her mouth as she swallowed and gagged, fighting against her reflexes.

  ‘Lucia, what have you done?’ Grace was down on the deck beside her, prising the hand away. ‘Lucia, for God’s sake, tell me!’

  Now Lucia’s smile was ghastly. ‘I had to be certain,’ she said.

  A new, great rage pumped through Grace’s mind and body.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I won’t let you.’

  And not knowing what else to do, she left her side and went, as quickly as she could manage, inside to the phone.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Rosary peas. Also known as jequirity beans. Botanical name Abrus precatorius. From the family leguminosae. Common to Florida, the seeds a pretty scarlet and black, looking like ladybird beetles. Or jellybeans.

  Lethal jellybean look-alikes, abrin, about as toxic as ricin, a given part, these days, newspaper readers were led to believe, of the average terrorist’s handbook.

  Lucia was still alive – or had been when the paramedics had rushed her off to Mercy Hospital on the mainland.

  ‘She took a handful of them,’ Grace said later to Sam, sitting beside him in the Saab, still shaking at the memory. ‘Right in front of me – they’d been right under my nose the whole time and I couldn’t stop her, I couldn’t do anything.’

  They were on their way to Jackson Memorial, because a cop at the scene had told Sam that Grace had refused to let the paramedics check her out, even though she’d looked distinctly unwell when they’d arrived. And Lord knew that Sam had experienced one of the most heart-stopping moments of his life when he’d seen the police cars outside the Busseto house, had brought the Saab to a tire-squealing halt and charged into the house – only to start breathing again when he’d seen Grace sitting on the couch, white-faced but alive.

  ‘I’m perfectly fine,’ Grace had tried to reassure him. ‘I thought Lucia might have put something in my tea, so I imagined I was feeling bad, but I hadn’t been feeling so great before I left home, so it had nothing to do with poison.’

  That was when Sam had insisted on driving her to Jackson Memorial. Mercy might be closer, but he was afraid Grace might want to see Lucia – if she was still alive – and with Dr Walden still away, there was no point going further to Miami General.

  ‘I should have realized what she was building up to,’ Grace was still berating herself in the car. ‘It was textbook stuff – she’d lost the last person who mattered to her, she’d done awful, wicked things, and now she was spilling it all before dying. I should have known what was coming, found a way to help her before—’

  ‘Grace, stop,’ Sam called a halt. ‘Lucia wasn’t your patient, you’re not her psychologist. What you were today was just human, a pregnant woman faced with a killer.’ He glanced sideways at her still taut, pale face. ‘Sweetheart, you called the paramedics, you gave them all the facts, you did what they told you to do. There was nothing else you could have done.’

  She didn’t answer.

  Grace was still in shock, though not the kind – according to the doctor who’d examined her – that required hospitalization or treatment. ‘Take her home, spoil her and keep an eye on her,’ had been his advice to Sam, since there was, so far as anybody could tell at that stage, no evidence that Lucia had poisoned her.

  Except that the local police still needed her statement, and – perhaps because they were unaware of what had gone on in Naples – Sam was able to convince them to let him remain at Grace’s side during their questioning.
And even as he listened to the horrors – filling in blanks in ways almost impossible to reconcile with the nice lady who’d been coming to work in his wife’s office, in their home, for two years – all he really wanted was to keep watching Grace, touching her, holding on to her.

  One of these days he supposed he might get around to telling her how mad at her he’d been for getting herself into danger, how frustrated he was by the infuriatingly protective part of Grace’s nature that had made her keep her angst over Terri from him and that had made her drive straight to Key Biscayne to comfort Lucia Busseto instead of waiting to talk to him first.

  ‘I left a message,’ she’d told him earlier, a little warily.

  ‘Yeah,’ he’d replied. ‘Big help.’

  But then he’d left it alone, because all that mattered now was taking care of her and their unborn baby son, getting police business out of the way as fast as possible, and getting her home.

  ‘I want to see Cathy,’ Grace said, the instant the questions were finished.

  ‘She’s being driven back as we speak,’ Sam told her. ‘So all we have to do is get there ahead of her, OK? So you’ll let me take you home, put you to bed, lock the front door, turn off the bedroom phone?’

  ‘All sounds good to me,’ Grace said.

  ‘And no one’s going to come into our house except Cathy and, maybe later, my dad,’ Sam added. ‘And if anyone – I don’t care who they are – thinks they’re going to ask you another question until after you’ve rested for a good long time, they’ll have to break down the door and take me on first.’

  Which was, more or less, how it had gone.

  Cathy had arrived soon after they had got home – having looked in on Saul so that Grace could satisfy herself that he was no worse – and they had told her, as briefly and gently as possible, about the drama that had unfolded in Key Biscayne that afternoon.

  ‘So Lucia really was Kez’s aunt.’ Cathy had been reeling. ‘It’s all just so hard to believe.’

  ‘Believe it,’ Sam had told her grimly.

  And then he had heated them up two bowls of Grace’s homemade minestrone (which was always on hand in the freezer), after which he had finally tucked up both his girls in their beds, and it was a measure of their sheer exhaustion that neither of them had argued.