A Fierce and Subtle Poison - Samantha Mabry Page 0,16
work out in the forests near Rincón, but that did not mean he was a cruel man whose neglect drove his wife first to madness, then to witchcraft, then, finally, away for good. The windows of the house were shuttered, not to seal in some kind of curse, but because the man was rarely home.
“The women on this island are ignorant, Lucas,” my dad had said. “Because they are ignorant, they are fearful, and because they are fearful, they make up stories to explain things that don’t need explaining. Ignore them. Don’t let their nonsense make you fearful, too.”
After that, he’d reached for his newspaper, popped open the pages, and went back to reading.
His advice had missed its mark. The señoras’ stories didn’t make me fearful; I didn’t fear stories, or closed-up houses, or witches, or notes from ghosts, or even the possibility of being cursed. I’d spent my whole life on this island running toward those things, throwing rocks back at those who threw rocks at me, waiting up for phantoms. What I feared was a future where I ended up a version of my dad: oblivious and arrogant, disappointed in clearly beautiful things.
Most everyone in Old San Juan hated my dad because it was easy to hate my dad. He came in and built resorts on their beautiful beaches. He destroyed or warped everything the locals loved about their island in the name of “progress.” He talked down to them. When we walked through the public squares, I would watch people sneer at him behind his back. Old women would flick their fingers and mutter curses.
I’d tried to be different, but despite my efforts to not become my dad, it was happening. If people hated him, they hated me, too—they hated the way I always had money but no job, how I was arrested for minor offenses but never charged, how I broke their daughters’ hearts and only sort of cared. And if they hated me, they would have no problem trying to scare me. What people never seemed to realize, though, was that I don’t scare easy.
Toward the middle of Calle Sol, Señora Garcia came out of her courtyard in her bathrobe bare-handing a rigid, dead cat. It was most likely the latest victim of Señor Guzmán and his glass-laced chicken scraps. If the old woman wondered why I was running full tilt down her street in the middle of the day, she didn’t show it. After casting a disinterested glance in my direction, she dropped the cat into the trash can, wiped her hands on her robe, and walked back into her courtyard. I passed her gate just in time to hear the latch click into place.
I neared the end of the street and slowed. The scientist’s house looked like it always looked: derelict and unloved except for the leaves bursting over the courtyard wall.
When I got to the gate, I stopped to catch my breath and study a series of rusted-over iron latches affixed to the wood.
Inspired by Marisol’s boldness from last night, I glanced up and down the empty street and then pounded my fist against the gate five times.
Within seconds, I heard an interior door open, followed by the sound of slow footsteps across stone, followed by the squeals of metal locks and hinges protesting their use. Overhead, a seagull let out a shrill cry. I looked up to see it gliding in my direction. Just before passing over my head, the bird squawked as if a handful of feathers had been yanked from its skin. Its body twisted violently, and it flew off in the opposite direction.
All the birds knew better than to fly over a cursed house.
“You’re Michael Knight’s son, are you not?”
I turned my gaze down to the man in front of me and momentarily lost my voice.
I expected the scientist to be some decrepit thing, hunched over and clutching a cane with a hand frozen by arthritis. In my mind, the years of guilt, poison, and pain would’ve appeared in the lines of a sagging face and cataract-clouded eyes.
Instead, I saw a man roughly my dad’s age. He was standing up board-straight, dressed like a rich person from a Dickens novel, with brown herringbone pants, a matching vest, and a white button-up shirt. His only slightly graying hair was long on top and hung across his forehead in unkempt waves. A rose-gold watch chain dangled from his breast pocket.
I glanced over his shoulder and into the courtyard, not knowing