Chapter Thirty-One
Thirty-One
“I can’t leave you alone for a second,” said Tariq that evening when Harper told him about last night’s encounter with Asher at her apartment.
They were dining at Passionfish in Pacific Grove. The restaurant boasted sustainable seafood and an extensive, oddly affordable wine list. The tables were small and intimate, the lighting low and atmospheric. Murmured conversations and tinkling silverware and glassware surrounded and cocooned them.
Harper knew Tariq was trying to make light of what happened, but his eyes shone with anger.
“Asher’s in custody?”
She nodded. “Last I heard.”
“Bastard’s rich,” Tariq said. “He’ll make bail soon enough.”
“Probably. Ellen already called a locksmith to fix my door, and he’ll put another dead bolt on while he’s at it.”
Tariq gave a curt nod but wasn’t happy. “Maybe you should come stay with me.”
She smiled. “I appreciate the offer, but I’m not sure you and I are ready to move in together.”
“It wouldn’t be like that. You know what I mean. Just until things settle down.”
“Thank you, but no. I suspect Asher just sort of lost it, given everything that’s been going on.”
“You really think that’s all it was? I don’t.”
Harper wasn’t sure how to respond because in truth she didn’t think so, either.
“You said he was asking about a journal?” Tariq continued. “What journal?”
“The one that was on a workbench in the basement. Delilah had combined her modern journal with an old one she and Asher found as kids in Soren’s laboratory.”
“You took it?”
“He said I could have it when we were in the bar, remember? He only changed his mind after. Anyway, it’s in Ellen’s safe.”
“What’s so special about this journal?”
“I’m not sure. There are a lot of recipes and instructions for making tinctures and tonics, that sort of thing. Various botanical extracts, some pretty gnarly anatomical drawings.”
“Doesn’t sound like anything worth killing over.”
“We don’t know that Asher’s killed anyone, Tariq.”
“I’ll rephrase. Why would an old book of recipes inspire him to break into your apartment and attack you?”
“That’s a good question. I haven’t found anything particularly noteworthy in it other than the fact that Delilah was messing around with microdosing with some scary poisons. I’ll work on it more tomorrow, and Naomi’s going to take a look at it, as well.”
Tariq raised his eyebrows. “The Nemesis? Good for her.”
“I know, I was surprised, too.” Harper smiled.
“Turns out, Naomi’s not that bad. I mean, she still doesn’t like me much, and she’d rather have a chemical engineer on the faculty than a historian, but she’s smart.
I thought she might be able to tell me about the contents of the journal from the perspective of a lab scientist.”
“Does Asher know you have the journal?”
“He clearly suspects it.”
“Then what makes you think he won’t come back for it once he’s out on bail?”
“I’ll get a restraining order.”
“Oh well, in that case,” Tariq said sarcastically. “You’ll have a piece of paper to protect you. What a relief.”
“What would you suggest, Tariq? My apartment will be quite secure with the new locks, and he’s not a cat burglar, so unlikely to come in through my windows. He now knows I have pepper spray and will use it. You want me to borrow Ellen’s gun? Would that make you happy?”
“Not really. All he’d have to do is get it away from you and you’d be much worse off.”
“That’s kind of my point. I appreciate your concern, and I don’t take the threat Asher poses lightly. But I won’t live as a prisoner because some man has decided he has the right to threaten me.”
“I hear what you’re saying,” Tariq said. “I don’t like it, but I get it.”
After they ordered a tres leches crème br?lée to share for dessert, Harper excused herself to use the restroom. She brushed her hair and twisted it into a bun, securing it with a couple of No. 2 pencils. She took her glasses case from her bag and slipped on her old pair of black-rimmed glasses.
Upon returning to the table, she murmured in a husky voice: “Someone here order a naughty schoolteacher fantasy?”
Tariq slept like a corpse: on his back with his hands folded over his chest.
Harper fell asleep for a while but woke up in the small hours of the night.
Usually the sound of rain against the windowpanes was soothing, but she couldn’t get her mind off Delilah and Soren’s journal.
When she and Tariq returned to her apartment last night, she had retrieved it from Ellen’s safe and set it on the table next to her computer so she could study it first thing in the morning.
After half an hour of trying but failing to go back to sleep, Harper gave in to her racing thoughts. Technically, it’s morning. Careful not to wake Tariq, she slipped out of bed, settled in at her table, switched on a small desk lamp illuminating the Louise Glück poem, and opened the journal.
Speak to me, tell me your secrets.
On what looked like it had been Soren Perles’s original first page, he had inscribed:
Venenum est in pondere. Medicamentum in veneno est
The poison is in the dose. Medication is in the poison
Harper winced when she saw Delilah had used a garish green highlighter on many of Soren Perle’s notes, especially those that mentioned Isabel, and the baby.
She had made comments, tiny sketches, and recipe notes on almost every page.
Constance Bell would be appalled at the mistreatment of the historical document, but it did make it easier for Harper to start piecing things together.
The rumors appeared to be true: Soren and Isabel Perles had been involved in an incestuous relationship. And according to what she could glean from Delilah’s scrawled notes and marginalia, so were Delilah and Asher. Not currently, but years ago, as children. She had written:
He won’t stop, he won’t let me go.
He says he still loves me like that.
I’ve told him it’s wrong, that I want a normal life.
Why won’t he leave me alone?
A folie à deux, indeed. Had Delilah been trying to get away from Asher ever since they were young?
Were these scrawled messages the reason Asher had become so furious that time in the basement?
Could jealousy, mixed with a desire to keep his behavior a secret, have motivated him to murder his sister?
Because if he couldn’t have her, no one could?
And did Asher then eliminate the ghost tour leader because Joel knew the secret?
Harper kept reading, the story of Soren and Isabel Perles gradually coming into focus.
After failing his medical school exams at Harvard, Soren returned to Monterey, bringing his medical cabinet on the train with him and presenting himself as a doctor.
Which, in many ways, he was. Plenty of physicians at that time had been trained by another physician, rather than at a medical school, and Soren at least had some academic training.
According to his lab notes, Soren was trying to understand human anatomy and biological systems at a time when germ theory was unknown and many of his contemporaries still attributed disease to bad humors.
It was not unusual for medical students at Harvard to have to dig up their own specimens—in fact, it was so common that laws were passed in an attempt to prevent it.
But the journal revealed that Soren had continued the practice upon returning to Monterey.
It certainly would explain all the bones strewn around his basement laboratory.
He thought, among other things, that his mastery of science would somehow endear Isabel to him, but it seemed to do the opposite:
My beloved fears my work, my studies. She tells me it is evil, wrong. She tries to open that door, “to let the truth out,” she says. Time and again I slam it closed and lock it, and yet again she tries.
Harper imagined the scene: Isabel opening that door, looking down to Soren’s lab and spying him hunched over and dissecting dead bodies stolen from local cemeteries. Screaming at him to stop. That he was evil.
Harper continued reading.
Our babe died last month, and still my beloved Isabel is beset by such melancholia she vows she will never recover.
In his practice, Soren not only treated the local populace as best he could, but he also experimented on them with various botanical concoctions. He was a passionate advocate for the efficacy of homeopathy and microdosing.
If Harper was reading Soren’s nearly illegible handwriting correctly, he had been desperate to treat Isabel, and to that end concocted a tincture combining oleander, Brugmansia, and various other herbs in an alcohol solution.
First, though, he tried the tincture out on an unsuspecting male servant.
The servant not only survived the treatment but appeared to thrive.
But Soren had failed to take into account that men and women might react differently to his concoction, and that a patient’s body mass affects its efficacy. When he gave the same dose of the tincture to Isabel, she fell into a sleep so deep that Soren believed he had killed her.
I lay my dear sister to rest under the cypress, alongside the dear babe she so mourned, crying as I tossed the dirt upon the coffin. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return. Forgive me, my beloved.
Harper looked up from the journal, listening to the storm outside and hoping against hope that what she suspected happened next had not happened. She took a deep breath and continued reading:
I heard the strangest thumpings and moanings, and did begin to believe I was being haunted.
Until, having gone out to the garden to place flowers upon my beloved’s grave, I came to the terrible realization that I had been mistaken and had buried my dearest one alive!
My dear, sweet Isabel had not been dead but a spark of life still burned within her breast. I fell to my knees and began measures to save her, attempting every means of resuscitation known to medical science, but to no avail.
I failed her and she breathed her last in my arms. May she forgive me.
May our babe forgive me. May God forgive me, for I shall never forgive myself.
Harper had a sudden, vivid image of the Perles Mansion’s shadowy garden, lit only by silvery moonlight and perhaps a lantern, Soren Perles kneeling in the dirt beneath the branches of the great cypress tree, holding his dying sister in his arms, shouting out to the heavens for intervention.
The anguished cries, the wrenching guilt, the knowledge he had killed her…
Tariq’s phone buzzed, startling her. Harper went to turn his ringer off, so he would not be awakened. It was a text from Penny Paule, the otter wrangler.
They’ve been asking about you again. As to the alibi, babe, no sweat, I’ve got you covered.
Suddenly the lashing wind and rain of the storm seemed much louder. She looked up from Tariq’s phone.
Her front door stood wide open.