Chapter 17 Poison
Poison
It wasn’t that I was unaccustomed to lying. I was used to telling lies to protect my own reality. This felt like more than that. It was lying to protect someone else’s reality, and I didn’t want to break that illusion and for Cassandra to suffer the consequences.
Dr. Fox lifted her shoulder. “Yes. I’m sorry if that’s not the answer you want to hear, but my first duty is to keep my patient safe.”
I nodded. “I understand. If it’s possible, I’d like to see her.”
Dr. Fox gave me a small smile. “I’ll have her brought out.” She reached under her coat for a radio and spoke quietly into it.
I scanned the parklike setting. I didn’t know what would be worse, the illusion that things were fine, stuck at a fixed point in time, or the crushing knowledge of something awful.
I knew what I would choose for myself—I’d consistently chosen awful knowledge over time.
But I couldn’t force my desires upon someone else.
I had to walk into Cassandra’s world and agree to participate in her version of reality.
A side door opened, and a woman in a pink tracksuit was led by an orderly in a white uniform.
Cassandra had long gray hair, and dark eyes that rested on a tree, then a shrub, then the grass.
She seemed uninterested in people. Her gait was slow and shuffling, and her posture was stooped.
Though she was in her early sixties, she seemed much, much older.
The orderly led Cassandra to us and helped her sit on a concrete bench that curved around the table.
“Hello, Cassandra,” said Dr. Fox. “How are you today?”
Cassandra looked at a point somewhere off Dr. Fox’s shoulder. “I saw a monarch. They must be migrating.” Her speech was slow and deliberate.
“Yes, the monarchs are here. Aren’t they pretty?”
“Yes. They travel a long way, all the way from Mexico.”
Dr. Fox smiled at her. “Someone’s here to see you, Cassandra. I’d like for you to meet Anna.” She moved her hand to my place at the table, and Cassandra’s eyes followed her hand, then looked up at my shoulder.
“Hello, Cassandra. It’s nice to meet you.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Cassandra echoed, not sounding at all interested in my presence. Her gaze followed a dragonfly.
I took a deep breath. “I saw your daughter Viv the other day. She says hello.”
Cassandra smiled, her teeth small and worn. “Viv is such a nice girl, isn’t she? She writes me letters.”
“What does she write you letters about?”
“She tells me what she’s cooking. She likes to cook. And she got some eggs from her neighbor who keeps chickens. Not so many eggs this year as usual.”
“It’s been very hot,” I acknowledged. “But fresh eggs are delicious.”
“Yes. The neighbor has Araucanas. Good layers. I used to do a lot of things with eggs, when the girls were little.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, omelets, quiches. They’re also very good to clear out your energy, you know.”
“What do you mean?” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dr. Fox frown slightly.
“Oh, they’re great for that.” Cassandra leaned forward. “You take a fresh egg and pass it all over your body. Every inch. And then you crack it open and empty its guts into a glass of cold water. You let it sit for a half hour before interpreting it.”
“What does that do?” I played along.
“If you see spikes, people are talking bad about you. If you see an eye, someone has given you the evil eye. If you see dark spots, you’ve been hexed,” she whispered, eyes gleaming.
“That doesn’t sound good,” I said.
“That’s why you have to pour that down the toilet, eggshells and all, and take a bath with lots of salt.
The egg takes on the darkness. You have to do it over and over, until it comes up clear…
over and over…” Her gaze grew misty. “You should try it. It would help you. You’ve got a very dark aura, you know. ”
Dr. Fox gently reached out for Cassandra’s hand. “We talked about this, remember? About things that aren’t real?”
Cassandra rolled her eyes. “I’m not allowed to talk about that stuff.”
I changed the subject. “Tell me about your daughters. I’m sure you’re very proud of them.”
Cassandra smiled. “My girls are so smart. Smart and beautiful. Viv wants to be a biologist when she graduates. She got accepted into college. She’s going to be so good at it. That girl has the biggest heart.”
I thought back to the Viv I knew, who had abandoned her dreams to work at the local bar and mutter curses in her parlor. She was trying to get back to that—I recalled the college rejection letter on the coffee table. Once upon a time, she had been someone else.
We were all someone else, once upon a time.
“She’s going to be a great biologist,” I said. “How about Dana? What does she want to be when she grows up?”
Cassandra blinked, as if a bug had flown into her eye. She rubbed her brow and smiled. “Dana wants to be an artist. But I’m hoping she’ll choose journalism. She’s really good with people.”
“That’s wonderful. We definitely need more journalists.”
“She’s got this charisma. She can put anyone at ease. Strangers will walk up to her and tell her their life stories.”
“What else does Dana like to do?”
Cassandra’s brow furrowed, and I realized her recall was proximate. She could remember things from twenty-five years ago as clearly as if they had happened yesterday. Maybe she was the best witness I could find. “She’s really popular, and that worries me. All those boys circling her like wolves.”
“I heard she has a boyfriend.”
Cassandra made a dismissive gesture. “I told her not to fuss with boys. Boys come and go. She likes that boy Rick. He’s a good boy, but it’s not good for a girl to settle down so quick. She said they agreed to be friends.”
“That makes a lot of sense. How did he take that?” I hoped Cassandra’s memory was from very close to the time when Dana disappeared…frozen at a point just before she vanished.
I was most struck then by the softness in her eyes, the affection with which she spoke about her daughters, the details she knew about them.
“I think it was his idea. He’s going off to college. She agreed that it made sense, but she’s sad about it, you know? Young love’s like that, always bittersweet.”
“Are there any other boys who like her? I heard about Luke and Jason and Wally.”
Cassandra frowned. “There are too many boys looking at her. I don’t like that.”
“Which boys?”
“Those rich boys from Warsaw Creek. They came to the door the other night, looking for her.” Cassandra’s mouth turned down.
“Who? And when was this?” Cassandra would never be acceptable as a witness in any court, but maybe she could lead me to hard evidence.
“I think it was Wednesday. Viv and Dana were both out at their part-time jobs. They both work for the milkshake shop.”
“Who came to the door?”
“That boy Jeff. And his friends Quentin and Mark. Dana doesn’t like those boys. They made fun of her for being poor.” Cassandra’s knuckles whitened on the edge of the table. “We aren’t poor, but everyone looks poor to them.”
Dr. Fox shot me a warning look.
“What did the boys want?” I asked.
“They heard Dana had a Ouija board. They wanted to borrow it from her. I told them no, and that they needed to leave my girls alone.” Cassandra’s lips pulled back on her thin teeth.
“That’s a very strange thing to ask for,” I said.
“Those boys have bad magic. Very bad.” She shook her head. “They knew my girls were witches. I always told the girls to be quiet, to go under the radar, but they knew, they knew…” Her gaze grew distant, and her soft fingernails dug into the concrete table.
“I think that’s enough for today,” Dr. Fox said.
I leaned forward. “They wanted your girls because they were witches?”
Cassandra’s gaze fell full and heavy on me. “Those boys wanted Dana’s blood. They wanted power, and they took her…” Her face crumpled, and she covered her face with her hands. A high-pitched keening sounded, like the cry of a bobcat at dusk, and it lifted the hair on the back of my neck.
She looked at me through parted fingers. “But they’ll pay. The river spirit will make sure that their bloodlines end in the bottom of the river…”
Dr. Fox stood abruptly and wrapped her arm around Cassandra. She nodded to the orderly, and they lifted her to her feet.
“I told him. I said: ‘Frederick, you watch out for my daughter.’ And he didn’t!” she wailed. “He was a hundred miles away when…when…”
“This interview is over,” Dr. Fox said curtly. “I hope you got what you wanted.”
I watched as they took the wailing woman back to the brick building.
I didn’t know if I’d gotten what I wanted, but I got…something.
—
I sat in the car. Something was prickling at me. I pulled out my laptop and continued background checks on the boys Dana dated. I knew the Kings of Warsaw Creek were assholes, but I wanted to see if I needed to broaden the field.
The first guy, Wally, was career military. A response from the DOJ said that he was in OPSEC, at an undisclosed location, right now, and that he hadn’t been in the US for two years. I could cross him off the list of suspects.
The second, Luke, had died in 2004, in a motorcycle accident in Montana. He’d been startled by some bison crossing the road, ditched his bike, and unfortunately met his end bleeding out in that ditch.
The third guy, Jason, was working on a crab fishing boat in Alaska.
I guessed it was possible that he held a torch for Dana and had come back to create havoc.
But his parole officer said that, to her knowledge, he was on the straight and narrow after serving his time for armed robbery.
She’d left a message for him, and he’d called her back from Sitka when his boat was unloading.
It was high crab season, with thousands of dollars to be made, and it didn’t make sense that he’d sacrifice the money to go trekking down to the mainland to cause trouble.
Revenge could wait for the offseason, right?
That left the regular boyfriend, Rick. I liked him more for revenge, since he’d been more than just a casual hookup.