A Fierce and Subtle Poison - Samantha Mabry Page 0,15

around her were the letters from the butcher’s son that hadn’t blown away, along with loose pages from her Bible. The nuns gasped. Some dropped into dead faints when they realized what their sister had done with the pages of the holy book.

“That’s why they put you in this room, you know,” the girl told me, “to scare you into leaving. Everyone here hates you and your dad for coming in and acting all stuck up. They’re waiting for the young nun to come back and shake you from your sleep and tell you to leave her room.”

Then, finally, the girl let me kiss her.

If the girl was trying to scare me, it didn’t work. Every night for the rest of that summer, I stayed awake as long as I could and waited for the nun to come back to her room. I even left notes for her, first on my bedside table, then near the door where she’d know to expect them. In those notes, I told her I wanted to help her. I didn’t know how, but I would try.

But those late nights were a waste. The young, triste nun never came, unless it was to look over me as I slept.

By the following summer, the girl who had taught me to kiss was gone. The other maids told me her mother had saved up enough to move to New York.

Over time, the memories of my kissing lessons faded. They came back, however, when I’d found that first note—the one with Marisol’s crossed-out wish—slid under my door, and then again, after I came back from Condado Beach and found another.

Six

LIKE THE ONE with Marisol’s crossed-out wish, this note had been written on stationery from the hotel. But unlike the one with Marisol’s crossed-out wish, it hadn’t been tossed over the wall last night. It had been tossed over the wall five years ago. By me.

I wish I could lift the curse over the house at the end of Calle Sol so the birds would fly over it again.

The paper was dirty and smudged in places, as if passed through many sets of hands, and the crease in the center was fragile, as if it had been unfolded, read, and refolded several times.

And, underneath my barely legible scrawl, in that perfect cursive: So, what’s stopping you?

“Señor Knight, is there a problem?”

I spun around. Clara, an elderly woman who had been working at the hotel since as long as I could remember, was standing in front of me on the mezzanine, holding a tray from room service. She glanced at my door, which was wide open, and then to the paper in my hand. She smiled slyly.

“It’s not what you . . . ” I stammered.

“I have your dinner here, Señor Knight,” she said, wiping away her grin so quickly I wondered if I’d imagined it.

I shook my head and put my hand to my now-throbbing left temple. “I’m not hungry. Please stop calling me Señor Knight. Just call me Lucas.”

“Sí, Señor Knight.” Clara nodded and headed over to the staircase. She took a single step down, stopped, and glanced in my direction. That same sly smile flickered and then disappeared. As she descended the stairs, the dishes on her tray rattled against each other.

Hushed voices came from the other side of the courtyard. There, a cluster of housekeepers, all in their humble gray shifts and clunky black shoes, stared at me the way grandmothers do when they know they have age and wisdom on their side, chin tipped up slightly, eyes narrowed.

I crammed the note into my back pocket along with the other and took off down the mezzanine. I leapt down the stairs two at a time, and, after weaving my way through the line of guests checking in at the front desk, burst onto the street.

From there, I sprinted in the direction of the scientist’s house.

Once, when I was a kid, I’d made the mistake of repeating to my dad some of the stories I’d heard from the señoras about the house at the end of Calle Sol. It had happened, of course, during breakfast. I remember him neatly folding up the newspaper he’d been reading. After taking a sip of coffee, he’d set his porcelain cup down slowly and leaned across the breakfast table. He’d told me not to believe old ladies. He’d said it was true that the man who lived in the house at the end of Calle Sol was a scientist who did