The Poison Artist by Jonathan Moore

Author:Jonathan Moore [Moore, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-544-54643-1
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2016-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

When he came back to his house, he put the groceries away and then took Bridget’s paintings, carried them into the bedroom, and leaned them against the wall inside her empty closet. As if by shutting them away he could close off that part of his heart. Then he went into the kitchen, uncorked a Loire Valley Sauvignon Blanc, poured a glass for himself, and kept the open bottle on the counter. He’d need it in a few moments.

He knelt and opened a cabinet, taking out a pair of maple cutting boards and a stockpot. Emmeline wanted to watch him cook, and there would be plenty left for her to see at midnight when he arrived. But he wanted to make a stock and reduce it first, to save time later. He coarsely chopped carrots, celery, shallots, and an onion. At the store, he’d bought eighteen live oysters, and he sorted through these now, picking six for the stock and saving the rest for later. He shucked the oysters over the pot so that it caught both their meat and their liquor. Then he added the vegetables, threw in a sachet of bay leaves and peppercorns, and covered everything with a cup of the white wine and a splash of cold water.

While the stock came to a boil, he cleaned the cutting boards and the knives he’d used, and then stood with the wineglass, looking out the window at the incandescent fog below the hill, the ground-clinging clouds lit from beneath by sources Caleb couldn’t see. There would be streetlamps down there, and Christmas lights blinking on the eaves of the row houses. Illuminated windows spilling the light of family dinners, front rooms brimming with guests. But all that was obscured. Caleb just saw a glowing blur of gray.

Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve, he thought.

Bridget would go to Grace Cathedral just before midnight. If things had gone differently this week, he’d have been there too. It would have been his first service there. If they did a candlelight service, he’d have watched the firelight spread wick to wick from the front of the cathedral until Bridget lit her candle from her neighbor’s flame before turning to him. Offering him, as ever, her heat and light. And then he would have held her right hand with his left, their white candles guttering hot wax onto the paper hand guards, the flames bending and smoking as the congregants sang. Going home, they’d have heard the midnight bells toll most of the way down Nob Hill, would have felt the bronze vibrations deep in their stomachs at each church they passed.

He didn’t know how to approach Bridget, even in his thoughts.

He’d been standing in this spot when she’d thrown the tumbler last week. Now he moved close enough to the dark window glass that he could see the transparent reflection of his face. The wound on his forehead was mostly healed. The cut had scabbed over, and the split edges of the skin were crawling back toward each other, cells knitting a new matrix.

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