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 phone calls 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’s for 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 call you for rescheduling when his health has improved.”
No.
It was the only thought running through my head at the time. Rent was due in a week and a half. It was this or nothing.
“But why? If he’s ill, and his physician is there, wouldn’t that make for an ideal interview?”
“Are you implying that the suffering of my employer is a prime time for him to make a business decision?”
“What? No, I—”
“Because if so, then perhaps I should hand this back to you.”
“No! No, but . . . if there was any time for the physician to need assistance, now would be it, wouldn’t it? To . . . test my skill.”
He raised a gray eyebrow.
“Could you ask him?” I insisted. “Please.”
The door creaked again as the man glanced behind him into the vast interior of the home.
“Perhaps.”
“I’ll wait. I’m happy to wait.”
At last he nodded and motioned with a finger for me to stay put. I ignored how it was the same motion I used on our old dog and instead bade him a quick thank-you before he shut the door and shuffled off into the unknown, leaving me to wait outside.
I stared down at my feet, at how the ragged soles of my mother’s borrowed heels appeared in sharp contrast to their surroundings. Never before in my life had I stood on a porch like that. A classic brick, so polished and clean it was hard to imagine that a weed could even consider sprouting up. Two streets over were brownstones whose small yards were filled with weeds, but not this one. It was as if the decay of history had never touched it. The bricks sat in charming little patterns, a far cry from the peeling, grayish paint and wood rot back home.
My feet tapped, an anxious habit, as I tried to go over anything that could be said to still give me a chance at the job.
It had been two years since I’d officially done anything in the medical field, but on paper my job at Aunt Clare’s counted. I even had a few instances of informally administering a shot of antivenin during the summer, which was exciting, especially since I wasn’t entirely sure if it was legal.
I glanced around the well-trimmed shrubbery and tried to imagine the likelihood of a surprise snakebite.
It seemed low.
After another moment the door opened and the butler motioned with a perfectly bent arm and straight fingers past the marbled entryway and toward what looked like a living room. It was then I realized that despite the building’s looking like a standard set of three or four town houses on the outside, it was in fact one. Just one, and it was immense.
“Can I get you anything? Water, perhaps?” he asked.
“Sure . . . water would be great, thank you.”
The little clicks of my shoes echoed in the chamberlike space until my feet came upon a pale Oriental rug. The room was larger than the entire first floor of my parents’ apartment. The walls a warm cream, illuminated by the lingering summertime sun as it filtered in beyond the ornate glass windows. It wasn’t clear to me whether the forbidding feeling of the furniture was a genuine one or simply a mistaken impression from my never having been in such a grand space in all my life. The small couch, with its carved wooden frame and tapestry cushions, probably cost more than a month’s rent. The rug, I didn’t even want to know.
I glanced back for the stern figure who was apparently the Verdeau butler, only to find him pacing across the entry with a tray neatly balanced on his palm. He set it down on a golden coffee table and began to pour a glass of water from a pitcher.
Little lemon slices caught my eye as they danced just atop the ice.
“If you need anything else, my name is George. Please, have a seat. It will be a moment before Mr. Verdeau is available.”
I reached forward to take the glass and did as asked.
Moments passed in absolute silence, other than the occasional car driving past and the muffled sound of a conversation from somewhere within the house. After some time and enough fidgeting, I picked up my résumé from where George had placed it on the table and began reading over my qualifications, some fabricated and some truthful but exaggerated. Just when I began to silently pray that I was not in deeply over my head, the sharp scent of licorice filled the air. I turned to George just in time to see the flash of something popped into his mouth and a familiar Amarelli candy tin slipped into his breast pocket.
From the back of the home, a door opened, followed by the sound of hurried footsteps growing closer.
“George! There you are,” said a man who was short in stature and balding, with a booming voice. He stopped and looked to me. “Who’s this?”
Before he could answer, I stood and extended my hand.
“Helena Gereghty. I’m here for the physician’s assistant position. We had an appointment.”
He looked at my hand and then to George before finally giving it a shake. His palm slicked in sweat as he held on to me, as if he were trying to crush my bones underneath as he squeezed.
“Martin Verdeau,” he said, letting go. “Thank you for coming by. As I’m sure George here has told you, we’re all a bit under the weather today. I’m going to need you to reschedule.”
I looked at this man, eager to see what the problem was, but merely found him slightly pallid and avoidant of the light streaming in from the windows. An annoyed squint to his eyes.
A hangover, I realized.
He was going to send me away because of a hangover.
“I see,” I said, “but if you’re under the weather, it might be a good time to test my skills. A trial run. So long as your physician is here.”
Martin looked at me, quiet, but I kept my back straight and my voice firm. A minor miracle.
“My physician has stepped out at the moment,” said Martin. “So I’m sorry, Miss Grat—”
“Gereghty.”
“Miss Gereghty, but your timing is off today.”
“I see,” I said again.
Satisfied with himself, and apparently dissatisfied with me, Martin motioned with his hand toward the door. I refused to move.
“Perhaps you can tell me more about the position,” I suggested. “You seem like someone who otherwise would be in fantastic health, so why the need for an assistant?”
Martin stared, silenced.
“Because it’s not for him,” came a soft but earnest voice from just behind a pillar in the entryway. “It’s for Jonathan.”
I turned to the sound and was instantly greeted by a blond girl in a cream satin slip. A dressing gown not meant for outside eyes, but the delicate golden chains of her necklace told a different story—as did her tights and heels. She was cherubic, sharp-eyed, and soft-cheeked. Beautiful, actually.
“Audrey!” Mr. Verdeau shouted. “I told you to wait upstairs.”
“I wanted coffee,” she said with a shrug. “Besides, Georgie wasn’t anywhere to be found, so I figured I’d wander on down myself. Who’s this?”
Her voice was as poignant as her gaze, and at the sound of it my mouth went dry.
“My apologies, Miss Audrey,” George said quickly. “This is Miss Gereghty. We were interviewing her to help Dr. Prosenko.”
“I figured it was business,” Audrey said with a swift glance to Martin, sounding bored. “I just didn’t know her name.”
She looked at me again, her cropped hair twirling about her jaw, and raised an eyebrow in expectation.
“Lena,” I said, my nerves at last catching up to me. “Well, Helena really, but my friends call me Lena.”
“And what am I to call you, then?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’d hate to think you were a friend and embarrass myself by calling you incorrectly,” she said, a corner of her mouth curling up into a smile. “Or even worse, offend.”
A flush rose to my face. She had the kind of friendly voice I once wished popular girls would use with me back in high school but never did. No doubt a skill obtained from growing up in the upper echelons of society. Her use of it then was especially powerful.
“Um, Lena . . . is fine.”
“Brilliant,” said Audrey, seemingly pleased. “Well, Lena, good luck.”
She popped her teeth along with a mint that was in her mouth before turning her attention to her phone and striding back across the entryway and toward what I assumed was the kitchen. The living room, at the loss of her, almost grew dimmer.
Mr. Verdeau sighed and pressed his fingers to the sides of his nose. “You’ll have to excuse my daughter.”
I looked to him, confused. “Why? She seems . . . charming.”
The man let out a great puff of air. “That’s a word for it. Charmed her way into having me pay for three years of law school.”
“Three? Did she drop out?”
I cursed my lack of a filter.
Mr. Verdeau humphed, not seeming to mind. “Worse,” he told me. “Graduated summa cum laude.”
Damn.
I tried to return to the task at hand.
“Mr. Verdeau, what did your daughter mean by ‘it’s not for you’? The job description didn’t give many details. I just assumed.”
He made a face as if some great lie had been revealed.
“Yes, so you caught that. Well, at least you’ve got good ears. No, Audrey is right. In some ways. Dr. Prosenko tends less to myself and more to my son. But your duties—”
I bettered my posture.
“Should you be hired,” he cautioned, “would be to assist with—oh, how should I put this?—smaller jobs. As they arise.”
“You mean I would be on call?”
“In some ways.”
“This is part-time? It didn’t say that in the advertisement.”
“No,” Mr. Verdeau confirmed with a hearty chuckle. “I should hope not. Wording like that tends to deter the more qualified candidates.”
I didn’t enjoy the implication but did my best to hide it. “How many hours, then?”
“Twenty-five to start,” he explained, at last seeming to realize he had been conned into continuing the interview despite his earlier efforts. “One to six on weekdays with the occasional weekends. But I want to be clear that the weekly wage is set at eight hundred dollars. That is the salary. The only additional wages you might receive would be a bonus for being called in or working events.”
It was a decent sum, despite his tone. More than decent. Astounding, considering it wasn’t full-time. A single week’s wages would help significantly with the rent for the month and was more than I was rightfully qualified for. It would go a long way in helping my parents out, maybe even with a bit to put aside for student loan repayment. Something I was champing at the bit to do.
Still, a few details in his speech were concerning, and so I asked him what he meant by “events.”
“I mean fund-raisers, parties, dinner clubs,” Martin answered. “I have a profile to maintain, Miss Gereghty. My family receives a great deal of attention. Are you good around people?”
The truth was, I was abysmal. Not in any sort of way that would be embarrassing, but more in the awkward sense of avoiding prom my senior year because of an overwhelming anxiety about mingling in a sea of nylons and being judged. I had grown taller and, for the most part, evened out into a form I was okay with, but the old wounds still stung. The thick curls and dark hair, like my aunt’s, and the freckles from my father’s side that spread across my nose and cheeks made sense now but hadn’t when I was younger. All that, combined with the fact that the wealth brackets between my family and his were stratospheres apart, made the old insecurities of childhood arise once more.
I swallowed them. “I like to think so.”
“Hmph,” said the man across from me.
Over the course of the last few minutes, his already pale and clammy complexion had grown ghostly. There was no question. I had seen a hundred similar hangovers my freshman year of college.
“Well, thank you for coming by, but I think we should wait until Dr. Prosenko is back to do any sort of real interview.”
Martin extended his hand, and I shook it with the tightest, surest grip I could manage. With a few more thanks, I was ushered out by George and left to watch as the door shut briskly behind me.
That was meant to be the end of it, I thought, and with the way I’d pushed him, it should have been. I had been far too desperate, and standing there, I couldn’t help but run over every moment of the interview when I’d placed my foot in my mouth. Every sentence where I should have just shut up but hadn’t.
For reasons I still do not understand, grace afforded me a second chance. Not five minutes later, as I began my walk back to the T stop, I reached into my pocket to find my CharlieCard gone.
I could have just gotten another one. Wasted another three bucks that I didn’t have for a one-way ticket I’d already paid for. Only something urged me to return, despite my humiliation and growing anger at my own mistakes, and thankfully I listened.
I rushed back down the tree-lined streets and past brownstone after brownstone, and I came to stand on that stoop again. As I knocked ferociously, my knuckles making a quick rhythmic tap on the wood, the door swung open and my words flew out as fast as they could manage with both politeness and brevity.
“Hi again. Look, I’m sorry, but I think I left my card here, and I—”
“Lena?”
I looked up, expecting a dark three-piece and wrinkles.
Instead I came face-to-face with Audrey Verdeau.
“It is Lena, right?”
“Oh. Yes. Hi.”
She smiled. “You said that already. Did you leave something?”
“Yeah, my . . . uh, my train card. I can’t find it, and I think it might have . . . uh, well, fallen on the couch.”
The entire situation only seemed to grow more embarrassing by being spoken out loud, but Audrey, to her credit, didn’t seem to mind. Instead she opened the door wider and waved me in.
“Well, you’re welcome to check for it.”
“Thank you.”
Walking back into the brownstone felt strange. Slower, even as my feet hastened to cross the shining marble entryway and return to my former seat. Audrey stood at the threshold, watching me with her shoulder elegantly pressed to the trim, a mug of coffee in one hand and her phone in the other. As I stuck my fingers between the cushions, she eyed me like a hawk, the steam rising from her cup and curling under the delicate curve of her jaw, until some minuscule sound had her turning back toward the staircase.
A grumble echoed, and then a heavy clunk sounded against one of the steps.
A man laughed.
“Audrey!” he shouted. “Audrey! Where’s Dad?”
I pretended to stare between the crease of another cushion as she shouted back.
“What are you doing out of bed?”
“What’s it to you? Where’s Dad?”
She hurried off toward the steps with a face ready for battle, her blush at once becoming war paint. The tone to her voice changing.
“He’s gone to the office! Get back upstairs!”
From my spot in the side room, there was another echo of a thud from the steps. The sound of unsteady feet, heavy and languorous. Then the loudest sound, that of a body slipping. Crashing hard as it fell.
“Jonathan! Shit.”
With Audrey’s shout I immediately abandoned my search to run out to the entryway. As soon as I crossed that threshold, I saw a man, not much older than myself, face white and hair dark, unconscious halfway down the steps in what looked to be an incomplete set of pajamas.
“What happened?!” I shouted, rushing over to Audrey’s side.
Her mug of coffee had been left on a small table, and she hovered, one hand clinging tightly to her phone and frozen as to what to do.
“He just—he fell. He’s fine.”
“Did he trip?”
As I reached him, I saw just how pale the man was. Eyes rimmed in bruised circles and cheekbones sharp enough to rival the edge of the step that his head currently lay on. He looked ill. Drastically ill, and yet his lips were noticeably purple with the stain of merlot, the same color as the silk of his robe.
I moved past Audrey and reached to tap his cheek, gaining no response.
“Help me sit him up!” I called back to her, but she didn’t move. I waited two beats and then shouted, “Come on!”
Lifting his head slowly, I checked for blood, my fingers thankfully coming back dry, and as Audrey at last walked those few steps, I hoisted him up and motioned for her to sit.
“Here, cradle his head. Like this,” I told her, positioning him. “You said he’s your brother, right?”
She nodded, just watching me and cautiously accepting her new position.
“What’s his name, again?” I asked, and checked his eyes.
“Jonathan.”
“Jonathan!” I shouted. ...
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