Chapter 1
The scent of death is sweet. A cologne of something chilling and saccharine—like spoiled figs, and honey, and mud. I know this because all my memories of Arrow’s Edge will be forever tainted with it. A miasma left to drift into the psyche late at night, when I’m driving, or walking, or given more than a second alone. When the frost begins to gather on windows and the sign of a New Year creeps in with all its flashing glory, that scent with its unique and terrible power consumes every part of me, until the very thought of each gilded room and once-polished floor is stained with it as much as the wallpaper still sits forever stained with their blood.
Months of my life can now be boiled down into these simple impressions: Wineglasses in hands and heels on marble. Herbs and the rise of steam from beakers. Perfume and grinning lips. A clink. A cut. A whisper. Each of them accurate but each of them simple, dreamlike things far prettier and far more poetic than the full reality. If that’s not what the mind is good for—to repaint and repossess every small horror of our lives—then perhaps it’s the heart’s doing. After all, it was my heart, as much as my hand, that led to their deaths.
It happened quickly, hitting the newsstands like whiplash: the fateful downfall of the Verdeau family and their empire. None of the tabloids ever managed to come close to the truth. Even if they tried—and some did try—they never stood a chance. Yet as I sit here now, almost a decade since I first came into their lives, there is not an ounce of marrow remaining in my bones absent of the details. While an indulgent game transpired between private rooms in Boston and the now-cobwebbed walls of Arrow’s Edge, a series of poisons took their toll, and of the hands that crafted them, one is the very same that attempts to write this now.
I guess some might call this a confession.
There was nothing sweet in the air as I stepped off the train and walked down the tree-lined street in Boston’s historic neighborhood of Back Bay. Not then anyway. Not that day. Autumn was still weeks away, yet the air was crisp and clean. Verdant, from the grass along the Charles River being freshly cut. But if there is to be any starting point for all this, then it was there, my heels covered in pollen, a gentle breeze in the curls of my hair, and the New England sun beating down on my face in a way that felt familiar and yet oddly foreign.
I had recently returned from living with my aunt in Italy and after two long years away had just set my suitcases down in the living room of my childhood home when my father handed me the want-ads page of the newspaper. Unemployment checks, he had explained to me over the phone the week before my flight, weren’t enough to cover the family anymore.The tired look in his bloodshot eyes the day of my arrival convinced me that he hadn’t been exaggerating. Something in him had changed in my absence, and the piles of pain meds and constant phonecalls from the debtors told me I had no choice. In my parents’ eyes, my vacation was over. Responsibility was calling, and anyone in the family who was old enough to work was expected to do their share.
Six months prior my father had been cut from the payroll at his job. No notice given and, to my knowledge, no clue that it was coming either. If there had been, his pride wouldn’t have let him say. His pride, as it were, had also prevented him from sending an e‑mail to let me know. At least until the meager savings we had as a family ran out.
The situation had made him and my mother more sour and resentful of my time abroad in the first place, a fact that made my homecoming less enjoyable by the second and made me yearn for the chance to return to my aunt’s side and back to a semblance of peace.
My aunt, Clare Ricchetti, was well known in the academic world so long as you studied botany or medieval history. Which, admittedly, not many people do. She was the most successful in her field out of any of us—another thing, I think, my parents resented. My mother especially, considering that Clare was her sister.
By the age of thirty-five, Aunt Clare had a fully established research garden outside a small village near Montefalco in Umbria, specializing in the reconstruction of medieval apothecary blends and once-lost strains of herbs. It was a tremendously useful garden niche as it was, and as a result of this specialty she frequently sold remedies to homeopathic companies and pharmacies alongside hosting Ph.D. candidates from illustrious places like Cambridge and Yale. She was always busy, tending to plants and doing interviews for documentaries in front of the lush greenery and fervent hum of bumblebees. She lived there, away from everything, in her beige dresses and lab coat, looking part scientist, part witch, and I loved her immensely for it. I also, I think, saw myself in her, and she in me.
I was a twenty-two-year-old mess of a med-school dropout when she offered me an internship. A girl doing her best to claw herself up from feelings of failure as I arrived on her doorstep, my ego bruised and fingers nervously clutching my suitcase. Saying I was a dropout isn’t entirely true, though. I only considered myself one. That’s what happens when you elect to defer your second year of med school due to burnout and a declining GPA. When you stare at the quickly accumulating debt and can’t convince yourself you’ll ever pay it off, so why bother getting more?
Europe in those days was far enough away from the disappointment of my life to seem like the best option. It was romantic, pastoral, and still close enough to family to be viable, thanks to Aunt Clare. Italy was a place my heart had always yearned to travel to after teenage years filled with falling asleep to documentaries on the Borgias or dreaming of scenic tours through Tuscany, but finances had never allowed me the chance to visit. Family vacations never happened beyond the continental United States, if beyond the Massachusetts border at all, and so I couldn’t say no when she offered. Plus, while it wasn’t much, it paid, saving me from suffering in a customer-service job while I tried to get my act together.
The sunrise every morning was misty and picturesque, filled with a pink-and-orange glow that I will never forget. At night the stars were brighter than I had ever seen and more numerous than my years growing up in Boston had led me to believe was even possible. It had been a slice of heaven and a time where my passion for medicine had only just begun to grow again. A sapling of a thing, bruised yet lovingly tended to in her care.
But family had beckoned me home. So I sat there, jet-lagged, over a dinner of chicken and boxed mashed potatoes as my father explained to me once more the details about the cutbacks at Ellerhart, a culling that followed the company’s purchase by some massive conglomerate eager to downsize. That, combined with a back injury from a fall he had neglected to mention to me before, made it difficult for him to find employment, and a series of medical bills without insurance to cover them meant that there was only one choice: I had to get a job as soon as possible, in the worst economy in decades.
And so it came to be that not a month later I found myself hovering at the door of an ornate brownstone in Back Bay. My coffee had been chugged, and I had paced the street for a good ten minutes while popping gum stick after gum stick into my mouth in hopes of not smelling like cookie dough, or coconut, or whatever obnoxiously sweet syrup I had chosen to load it up with in a fit of nerves the hour prior.
My nerves were not any better.
Caffeine had a poor track record with that.
I stood there surrounded by brick and greenery and glistening sports cars, with three minutes until my first official interview after weeks of applications.Then I took a breath, spit my gum into the bushes, and knocked.
Ten seconds passed, maybe twenty, before the door opened with a slow and dramatic creak.
“Yes?” a voice asked. The disdain was unimaginably thick.
My back straightened as I tried to hand over my résumé.
“I have an appointment. Lena. Helena,” I corrected. “Gereghty? It’sfor two-thirty.”
The old man looked at the paper for a second and then sighed.
“Mr. Verdeau is not well. All appointments have been canceled for the day.”
My outstretched hand dipped a little in disappointment. “Not feeling well? What’s wrong?”
Again I received a look of annoyance.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss.”
“Well, where’s his physician?”
“Tending to him. Look, Miss Gor—”
“Gereghty,” I said. “Like clarity.”
“Miss Gereghty, I’m sure you came a long way.” His sagging face tilted down as he peered at my outfit. As if somehow a man in his sixth or seventh decade could detect my zip code from the thread count of my shirt.“But perhaps we should reschedule.”
The butler’s eyes looked away from the transit card sticking out of my pocket and back to the freshly printed résumé in my hand.
“If your phone number is on that, then I can have Mr. Verdeau callyou for rescheduling when his health has improved.”
No.
It was the only thought running through my head at the time. Rentwas due in a week and a half. It was this or nothing.
Copyright © 2022 by Kit Mayquist. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
