A Fierce and Subtle Poison by Samantha Mabry

Author:Samantha Mabry [Mabry, Samantha]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2016-04-11T23:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

AFTER SAINT PIUS died in Rome during the second century, his hair and nails grew to great lengths and his corpse was sealed in wax. Then for whatever reason, Saint Pius’s mummified, wax-covered corpse took a trip across the Atlantic Ocean and ended up in a glass casket in middle of the San Juan Cathedral.

There are lots of saints there; their freaky wood and plaster likenesses watch over the space and care for the prayers that live as long as the little red candles stayed lit.

But Saint Pius isn’t made of wood or plaster. His weird, shrunken body is actually there—along with his ghost, if the stories are true. His leatherlike skin and brittle bones are perfectly preserved, along with the light brown hair that falls over his shoulders. When I was a kid, I would tiptoe up to his glass coffin and stare, waiting for his fingers to twitch. They never did. His permanent immobility gave me the creeps way more than if he were to suddenly sit up and turn his head to look at me.

I’d lit three of those little red candles—one for Sara, one for Marisol, and one for Celia—and had taken a seat in one of the pews within view of the saint—just an eyelid twitch would do—when I heard the clicking of footsteps coming down the aisle. Whoever it was scooted down the row directly behind mine, and sat down. The wood squealed. A Bible was lifted out of the compartment on the back of my pew. I could hear its pages swish as they were flipped.

Then, there was my name, spoken in a raspy whisper: “Lucas.”

I turned and came face to face with Detective Mara Lopez. As always, her black hair was pulled away from her face and slicked down.

“You remember me, don’t you?” She smiled with her thin, red-stained lips and then opened the flap of her dark trench coat in order to flash her badge. “From last summer? We spoke again the night you found Marisol Reyes, though I don’t blame you if you don’t remember that last encounter. You were pretty shaken up.”

Shaken up. That was putting it mildly.

“I remember.” I tried to keep my voice low but was still on the receiving end of a sharp look from an old lady kneeling in one of the pews in front of me.

The detective leaned forward and rested one of her hands on my shoulder. The crimson color on her fingernails almost exactly matched her lips.

“What are you doing here?” She nodded in the direction of the prayer candles. “Paying your respects?”

“I missed Marisol’s funeral.”

“Yes, I noticed that.”

Something hung between us in the silence that followed, like static in the otherwise stale church air. Why would she notice that I missed Marisol’s funeral? Why would she care?

“Is there something I can help you with?” I shifted in my seat. “I have to be somewhere in a little while.”

“Ah, yes.” She clucked her tongue and nodded. “The festival, right?”

With her hand still on my shoulder, she leaned in closer as if to tell me a secret.

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