Poison Lilies
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Synopsis
“Moody and riveting.” —New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice
In this eerily riveting thriller—the follow-up to the international bestseller Dark August—Gus Monet becomes dangerously entangled with a powerful family whose wealth and success are built on dark and deadly secrets.
After moving back to her hometown and solving her mother's murder, Augusta (Gus) Monet thought she was finally settled. Content for the first time in her life. Done with digging into the past.
But it’s not to be. Cue hard reset number whatever.
When Gus makes a mistake she can’t undo, she does the only thing she can: cuts and runs. Packs all her things in the dead of night and takes off. Gus lands at The Ambassador Court, an art-deco apartment building with cheap rent in one of Ottawa’s oldest neighborhoods where no one knows her. The perfect place for a fresh start—or at least a good place to hide.
She soon meets Poppy Honeywell, her reclusive elderly neighbor who wanders about in a pink kimono like an aging Hollywood starlet and who happens to be a descendant of the Mutchmores, one of the city's founding families. When a body emerges from an icy pond in a nearby park, Gus’s growing curiosity with Poppy and her influential family suddenly takes a perilous turn with deadly consequences.
The Mutchmores have been hiding a treacherous secret for decades—one they are willing to sacrifice anything—and anyone—to keep buried. Little do they know, that’s just the kind of secret Gus can’t resist.
Release date: May 24, 2022
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
Print pages: 368
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Poison Lilies
Katie Tallo
THE BAD NEWS IS THAT THE ELEVATOR’S BROKEN EVERY OTHERday and Gus’s new apartment is on the third floor of an old art deco, four-story building. Levi isn’t happy. Part golden retriever, part Spinone Italiano, Levi is a raggedy old man of a dog. Stairs are his least favorite thing. The apartment building was updated and converted to condos decades ago, but it’s far from modern. The units are either owned by aging seniors who’ve lived there forever, or they’ve been purchased as investment properties and are rented out to people who don’t care about outdated kitchens or creaky floors or broken elevators. People like Gus.
The good news is that the rent’s dirt cheap, which is perfect because she’s currently living off her wafer-thin savings since quitting her job at the pet store. Gus doesn’t mind the flickering light fixtures in the stairwell or the weird textured walls of the narrow hallways. Her apartment, number 305, is tucked at the quiet end of the hall near the back stairwell.
The building is in the heart of the Glebe. One of Ottawa’s oldest neighborhoods, where the houses have big front porches, old elms shade the sidewalks, and there’s a row of shops within walking distance of the building’s front door. An entirely new neighborhood where no one knows her face or name. A good place to hide.
Goodbye, Wellington West. Hello, fresh start.
Gus is a master of the fresh start. Although none of hers could really be classified as particularly fresh. For Gus, starting over has been more like a series of hard resets. The first and worst of them began when her mother died and she went to live with her great-grandmother Rose. She was eight. The next came two years later when she was sent to boarding school. Set adrift. Another came at seventeen, when she graduated from high school and moved to Toronto. Alone. Hard resets became a monthly routine when she met Lars. They lived on the road, always moving, always changing locations, IDs, names, personas. Never staying put. Always chasing the next score or thinking up the next con.
At twenty, she thought she was hardened to change, when out of the blue, another reset upended her life. Rose died, and Gus inherited her house. She ditched Lars, moved back to her hometown, and solved her mother’s murder. She didn’t see that one coming.
After that, Gus was done. At least she thought she was. She got the job at the pet store, a cute apartment nearby, and felt content for the first time in her life.
Cue hard reset number whatever.
This one was her own doing. Well, not entirely her own. It takes two to tango. But she blamed herself nonetheless. She made a mistake she couldn’t undo. She had no choice but to cut and run. Gus packed her things in the dead of night, left a rent check on the table, and took off. That was five weeks ago. Late November.
But that was then and this is now. It’s hard to believe January is just around the corner. A new year is about to arrive and with it another bone-chilling Ottawa winter. The small city is glazed in a layer of ice and snow that only hints of the deep freeze to come. Gus sits cross-legged in her new living room surrounded by boxes that she still hasn’t unpacked. Dusty shafts of sunlight bend through the window, exposing scars in the hardwood floors from decades of furniture scratches and boot scuffs made by strangers who lived here before her. But those people weren’t the strangers. Gus and Levi are. These are not her scars. Some date back to 1928 when the building was first built, seventy years before she was born. The place has history in its bones. She can hear it rattling in the water-heated radiators. She can glimpse it in the tarnished bronze around the electric fireplace and in the milky surface of the stained glass framing the mantel.
Soon Levi’s untrimmed nails will add new scratches to the hardwood. Soon they won’t be the strangers. The Ambassador Court will eventually feel like home. Or at least she hopes so.
Levi made himself at home the first week once he’d figured out where the sun hit the floors in late afternoon. Now he settles there every morning and waits, then basks in the warmth as it slowly drifts across his fur.
Gus is less settled. She’s either too cold or too hot. She figures it must be the radiators. One day, she’s excited to unpack and organize, the next she’s drained of all that get-up-and-go. Most days she defaults to her usual MO.
Box of Honeycomb cereal. Can of cream soda.
Clear shit off the sofa. Feet up.
John Wayne western.
Nap.
Repeat. Only this time with Pop-Tarts and coffee.
But today, something gnaws at her belly more than usual. A restlessness she can’t shake. Gus decides she can’t live among boxes forever. She eyes the old blue trunk where she keeps her childhood treasures—old notebooks, crayons, a doll, swimming medals, plastic clip-on earrings in an emerald silk bag. She drags the trunk across the room. Positions it in front of her sofa. On the edge of the trunk is a tiny bloodstain. She spit shines it away, then lifts the lid. She grabs her great-grandmother Rose’s nesting dolls and a photo box and arranges them on top of the trunk. The picture frame holds a photo of her late parents taken outside a pub during a weekend leave from Royal Canadian Mounted Police cadet training. They’re both in their twenties. Newly dating. Their lives ahead of them. Or so they thought. A year into their marriage, her father was killed just days before Gus was born. He was a rookie on a routine call that went sideways. Her mother died eight years later.
It’s no ordinary picture frame. There’s a compartment behind the photo where Gus keeps her gun. A purse-size handgun she got for protection. It’s remained in the photo box since the day she bought it. She likes knowing it’s there, hidden away but handy.
She places a mat at the front door, hangs a curtain in the bedroom, unpacks all the boxes, and puts things away in drawers and cupboards like you’re supposed to. But none of this helps. The uneasiness stalks her all weekend. It crawls across her skin when she’s lying in bed, and it bubbles in the pit of her stomach when she’s getting groceries at McKeen Metro. When she takes Levi for a walk in the park, it sends pins and needles through her fingers. She holds his leash tight as he scratches at the edge of Patterson Creek, trying to free the lily pads from the frozen ice. He does manage to dislodge an old penny from below the bridge. Gus digs it from his mouth and examines it: 1946. She’s surprised by how old it is and wonders if it’s been in the creek since the forties. She pockets it for good luck.
Sunday, Gus spends an entire day debating what to wear job hunting on Monday.
Monday, she delays the job hunt because decades-old grease has to be scrubbed from under the stove.
Tuesday, she washes all her clothes, carrying the basket down three flights of stairs to the basement laundry room. By the time she’s finished washing, drying, folding, and transporting them back up to her apartment, she’s not feeling well at all. The smell of detergent and dryer lint is making her want to throw up.
Wednesday, she throws up in the kitchen sink. Gus diagnoses herself with the flu.
That night she goes to bed and sleeps until Thursday night, when something wakes her from her duvet cocoon.
An earworm is going round and round her brain.
A repetitive sound.
A mewing.
At first, she thinks she’s dreaming.
Cat dreams.
Gus opens her eyes and listens in the dark. Levi’s warm body is pressed against her thigh. She looks at him in the dim light. He’s awake. Ears pricked. He’s listening too. The mewing stops. The dog turns to her and stares. A you haven’t walked me or fed me in a dog’s age stare. Gus sits up carefully. She’s light-headed and shaky. Definitely the flu. Levi jumps off the bed, wagging his tail. Gus rallies. She bare-foots it to the kitchen, wearing the same T-shirt and sweatpants she was wearing thirty hours ago. She prepares the special diet of ground beef and rice that Levi’s vet recommended. The mewing starts up again. It’s muffled.
Mew, mew. Mew, mew.
It sounds like it’s coming from outside. She peers out the living room window to see if there’s a stray trapped on a high ledge. Nope. She opens the front door of her apartment to check the dark hallway. A ceiling sconce flickers, but otherwise, nothing furry. Closing the door, she leans an ear to the stucco wall, moving slowly along it. The mewing gets louder as she inches back to the kitchen. Gus stares at a small cupboard door.
Mr. Curry, the building superintendent, said the cupboard was out of order so it had been sealed shut. Back in the day, it had been a dumbwaiter, one of four in each corner of the building serving the kitchens of each apartment. One of the peculiar features of the original building that no longer made sense in the modern world. Servants would use it to bring up deliveries from the main floor or send washing down to the laundry, which used to be located in the subbasement, two levels belowground. That subbasement is another of those original features that’s no longer practical to keep up. Mr. Curry said it’s on account of the annual spring flooding from Patterson Creek Park, a stretch of land beside the building. The park was built over a swampy bog, so there’s a lot of groundwater deep underneath it. Used to flood something awful every year, he tells her, even though she could care less about some subbasement nobody uses anymore. Mr. Curry likes to hear himself talk. He goes on about how there used to be a secondary level of parking down in the subbasement, along with big storage lockers, and a boiler room. Everything was moved up a level some years back, and the whole thing was blocked off.
Nothing but ghosts live down there now.
* * *
Oh and one very pregnant woman.
Gus tries to steady her breath as another contraction comes. She braces one hand against the cold brick while the other cradles her belly. She can feel the baby turning and kicking. It wants out. Gus’s thin T-shirt is soaked in sweat. Stabbing pains radiate across her pelvic nerves. She counts the seconds ticking by through clenched teeth. This one was longer than the last contraction, and it came sooner. Then it goes away, giving her a momentary reprieve. In the gap between contractions, Gus tries to focus. She needs desperately to remember what happened. A sliver of memory might save her life. She stares into the darkness, searching, but the fleeting images keep slipping through her consciousness.
All she can hear is that mewing.
Mew, mew. Mew, mew.
That’s it. She was standing in front of that sealed cupboard. That dumbwaiter. She remembers now. She ran a kitchen knife along the edges, scraping away the paint and caulking until she was able to loosen the hinges and pry the door open with a metal spatula. The hinges were so old that the wood splintered and the door came off in her hands. Chips of paint littered the linoleum floor of her kitchen. She put the door down and peered inside the narrow shaft. Up then down. The mewing was downward. She groped. Found the rope. Began pulling. The wheels of the dumbwaiter squeaked as it traveled toward her. Finally it arrived, coming level with the cupboard door, clicking into place.
That’s when she met Gish. A very large, very angry orange cat. Gish hissed and took a swipe at her forearm, scratching the skin with its claws. Drawing blood. Gus pulled away and the cat bolted into her living room.
At the time, Gus didn’t think much of the wooden compartment. The dumbwaiter was no larger than a bar fridge. A useless little elevator hidden inside a shaft in the wall. A shaft running all the way down to the subbasement. That’s what Mr. Curry had said.
Jesus Christ.
A daft grin ripples across her sweaty face.
She can’t believe it’s taken her this long to think of it.
It’s a way out.
If she can find it.
Gus is beginning to think she must have hit her head at some point.
Her brain feels like it’s idling, revving, then sputtering. Right now it’s revved up.
Seizing the moment, Gus stands. She staggers forward, groping along the wall. Palming the bricks, searching for a frame, an indent, a smooth section of plaster, a small handle, a wooden door, anything that might lead her to that stupid idiot of a dumbwaiter. Gus shuts her eyes. Tries to retrace how she got here. She needs to orient herself in the building. The shaft leads from the kitchens in the corner units, near the end of the hall. But where is she?
Think, Gus. Think.
The utility room suddenly comes to mind, and it’s quickly followed by a cascade of images. She is standing beside the boiler. Behind it, she finds a trapdoor that leads down to the subbasement. She climbs down a narrow metal stairwell. She sees herself in a dark passageway with crumbling walls. She walks toward the back of the building. The dirt floors are spongy. The air smells like dead fish. Her footsteps echo and multiply, making it sound like someone else is there with her. She’s moving south.
And then Queen Kong returns. Suddenly Gus is a giant. She lifts the roof from the apartment building, exposing the walls and stairwells, giving herself a bird’s-eye view of the configuration of each floor down to the subbasement. She can see her tiny insect-self way down below in the subbasement. There she is. Walking down a hall, approaching a door at the corner of the building. It’s the door to this room, and it’s right below the kitchen in her small one-bedroom apartment.
That dumbwaiter is somewhere in this room. She knows it.
In the pitch black, Gus steps away from the wall and takes six steps, imagining the layout of her kitchen. She turns and reaches out. Her fingertips hit wood. Bingo. A cupboard door. She raps her knuckles on it. It’s hollow.
Who’s the motherfuckin’ dumbwaiter now?
She laughs, then doubles over as a torrent of pain spirals across her belly and shoots down her thighs. The shock of it brings Gus to her knees. She cries out. A deep mournful cry that no one can hear. Her head spins as the darkness swallows her. She crumples onto her side in a pitiful heap on the floor. As she loses consciousness, Gus senses her body levitating. She is lifted from the grimy floor of the subbasement. She is weightless as she wafts up through the concrete layer between the floors, into the underground parking garage. Up and up she floats. One floor, then the next, and the next, metamorphosing as she passes effortlessly through the solid hardwood and finally comes to rest on the landing of the top floor of the Ambassador Court. Once there, she sees herself standing outside apartment 405. The one above hers.
Back when her only worry in the world was a stray cat named Gish.
* * *
Gus knocks.
She’s already tried the apartments directly below hers. A cardboard box held tightly in her arms. Lid closed. A moaning cat inside. 105 wasn’t home. The guy in 205 said he didn’t own a cat, but likes cats and offered to take it off her hands, but she wasn’t ready to give up.
Then Gus climbed to the top of the building to try the last apartment connected to the dumbwaiter. The one directly above hers.
And now here she is.
Apartment 405.
Knocking on a door that, once opened, changes everything. Brings her face-to-face with the strange and lovely occupant of the sprawling two-bedroom flat. An eighty-five-year-old spinster who has lived in that corner apartment her entire life.
An apartment she hasn’t left since the 1950s.
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