Poisoned Read online

  Poisoned

  A Casey Cort Legal Thriller

  Aime Austin

  Also by Aime Austin

  The Casey Cort Series

  * * *

  Judged

  Ransomed

  Caged

  Disgraced

  Unarmed

  Kidnapped

  Reunited

  Contained

  Poisoned

  Abused

  To believe in “the greater good” is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension.

  —Joan Didion

  One

  Veronica Bonilla-Garza

  April 6, 2007

  I singed my finger shoving a Pop Tart in the toaster oven as Tino brushed right past me.

  “Strohmeyer comes first before us, then?” I asked. It was a continuation of the argument we’d started upstairs when I’d heard Ivy slam the bathroom door open and sounds of her retching had echoed. When I’d begged him to call off, and he’d refused.

  If my eyes could have thrown daggers in his back, he’d have fallen right there in the kitchen. Instead, he grunted in response. Threw his coat over his shoulders. Fisted his way through the sleeves. Zipped the two sides together.

  “Do you think you’ll make it home early? I have back-to-back appointments until five thirty. Then I have to get Stella from day care.”

  "Yeah, maybe.” His shoulders, made bigger and broader in his wool coat, shrugged and walked out the door.

  Every single morning, my husband, Tino, got up and chose his job over his family. He would have said it was for his family, but that would have been a lie.

  How a man could love a brewery of all things above his wife and daughters was a mystery I tried to solve every single day. None of that mattered right now. Today of all days I needed him to pick his family first.

  “Tino!” I yelled. Maybe he was just outside shoveling snow or gathering firewood. I thought for sure he wasn’t just going to up and leave.

  Not today.

  “He not here, Mama,” Stella, my four-year-old, pronounced. Her little face was so serious I knew it was the truth.

  “For real?”

  Stella nodded. Pointed outside the kitchen window. Indeed there was a bald spot in the snow where his car should have been. How he had the gall to walk out when Ivy was sick—again, I’d never begin to understand.

  The gagging sound from the bathroom told me that I didn’t have the time today to deal with calling Tino to turn around and come back home. Instead, I took charge and did what I had to do: pick up the phone and call off.

  “Juanita?” My supervisor was on the line after I made it through the automated menu and the receptionist.

  I held the phone to my ear with one hand while trying to poke the Pop Tart into the toaster oven with the other. There were no hands left for me to soothe my youngest.

  Stella was having nothing to do with the mofongo that I’d already heated up and put on her giraffe plate. I could practically see the yellow cartoon animal frowning at me in disapproval.

  “Hi. This is Veronica Garza,” I said formally. It was the best unaccented voice I could do right now. I always made an effort to sound as blanquito as possible when I was dealing with doctors, government offices, or in this case—work.

  “No quiero mofongo, Mommy. I want Pop Tart,” Stella wailed. My daughter shoved away her platanos like I was trying to poison her to death by way of tropical bananas.

  I put my hand over the receiver, pointed to the toaster oven where her factory-made breakfast was heating half-heartedly. Tapped a finger against my lips in the vain hope that she’d take the cue to lower her voice.

  “Veronica?” Juanita’s voice called me back to the reason I was on the phone.

  “Yes. Sorry for all that. My daughter…”

  Juanita cleared her throat, impatient. It was clear that my boss did not want to hear about Stella’s toddler tantrum.

  “I can’t come in—”

  “The snow coming down over in Brighthill too?” Juanita interrupted before I could finish. “Your nine o’clock appointment canceled. As long as you make it in by ten, it won’t be a problem. We would not want one of our best massage therapists to kill themselves on the four-eighty. No Rocky River stay-at-home mama’s ‘me time’ is worth that.”

  Most of our morning clients hailed from the well-off suburbs. Brecksville was just south, Bay Village and Rocky River to the west.

  I could hear the phone moving away from Juanita’s ear, a shout down the echoey spa hall. I called her name, to get my supervisor back. To make sure she understood. When I heard her breathe into the receiver, I spoke before she was distracted again.

  “No, not late, Juanita. Not at all. You know how Ivy’s been sick,” I started. Ivy had been sick for most of the time I’d worked at Spasy as a massage therapist. This was not news. “She’s not good today,” I continued. “I need to get her back in to the doctor.”

  “Veronica—” Her sigh was long, deep. “We talked about this.”

  We had talked about this. My missing hours and sometimes whole workdays while I was in the emergency room. Or nursing Ivy at home on some new medication cocktail that treated the latest symptoms but never the real problem.

  I always found a sub, but there was a lot of scrambling on the spa’s part to make sure that clients were okay with someone different, that everything was covered.

  Spasy didn’t like to scramble. My customers liked me—a lot. That was good for tips. But it was bad for a corporate spa business that was happy to substitute one cog of a massage therapist for another no matter what lip service they paid to how special we all were.

  “Juanita. This will be the last time, I swear.” This time, I thought, this time, I’ll figure out what’s wrong with Ivy. I’ll get her the care she needs and cure whatever was making her sick once and for all. Everything will go back to us being a normal family like we were when we lived in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood.

  Sometimes I think this house was what made her sick. I hadn’t said anything to the doctors, but I’d stayed up half of last night doing research on radon, worried the colorless, odorless invisible gas could be responsible for Ivy’s symptoms.

  Maybe this time I’d finally get the guts to bring it up to the doctors. As long as I didn’t say anything about looking it up on the internet, maybe no one would laugh at me at the hospital.

  “You were already on probation, Veronica.” Juanita’s voice broke into my thoughts. “There won’t be any need for you to come in today. I’ll shift your clients over to Samantha.” My supervisor took a huge breath that ended on another long sigh. I didn’t like the sound of that sigh. “We’re going to have to let you go, okay?”

  Though I sort of knew it was coming, her words were a kick in the teeth. Not one I had been expecting when I picked up the phone. I heard Ivy coughing and knew there wasn’t a damned thing I could do to save my job, not at this moment.

  “I’ll get corporate to put your last check in the mail,” I heard Juanita say through the landline. “Please let us know when you can return your uniform.”

  I looked down at the hot pink scrubs that had always been a little too tight around my ass. It was one thing I wouldn’t miss. Didn’t want the hassle of that damned job anyway. Though I couldn’t reconcile my thoughts with the tears that had started smarting around my eyes.

  Stella placed her chubby hands on my already stained but otherwise clean Spasy top and patted me to get my attention. Now, I’d have to wash the smashed plantains and garlic off these before returning them.

  “What, Stella? I told you before you can get your Pop Tart when the toaster dings.”

  I could see her trying to keep multiple thoughts in her toddler brain. Her eyes shifted to the sound of thro
wing up coming from the hall bathroom. The loud chime of the toaster oven came next.

  “Mommy. Ivy’s sick again,” Stella stated the obvious. “I’m hungry.”

  “Juanita. Sorry. Thanks. I have to go.” None of what I’d said to my boss had probably made any sense, but I didn’t have the brain capacity to add politeness to my vocabulary just now.

  Before the toaster pastry turned too dark around its edges and Stella refused to eat what I knew was the last one in the house, I pulled the pastry from the oven. With the tips of my fingers burning, I tossed it on a plate in front of her, a smiling tiger’s face this time. I poured her milk and hoped that somewhere in there all this added up to a balanced diet. She took a bite and chewed happily. I flicked on the countertop television and flipped through the channels until some kind of cartoon was on the screen.

  One down.

  More sounds of throwing up bounced off the bathroom’s tiles.

  One to go.

  I dropped the phone and TV remote onto the laminate counter and hightailed it to the house’s single bathroom. My ten-year-old daughter was hunched over the toilet, her own portion of mofongo emptied out of her stomach and into the ceramic bowl. I flushed the food down into the septic system and tried not to think of it stewing in that concrete container along with all the other waste we’d produced over the years.

  “I don’t think I can go to school today,” Ivy said after she swiped the back of her hand across her mouth. Swallowing the bile that rose into my own throat with the smell, I jumped up and turned on the hot water in the sink. After I wet a hand towel in the warm stream, I turned off the water and pushed it toward her. Ivy didn’t take it, shaking her head.

  “Mommy!” Stella yelled from right outside the bathroom door. She had half a toaster pastry in her hand and half on her left hand. A hand that had just smeared strawberry filling along the newly painted bathroom wall.

  “Thirsty!”

  I tossed down the towel.

  “Did you finish your milk?”

  Stella shook her head so hard, her hair swished around the top of her blue roll-neck sweater.

  “I want fuzzy water.”

  “It’s called seltzer, Stella. The water is not fuzzy.”

  She disappeared back into the kitchen, probably to glue her eyes to the bright images that flickered across children’s programming. That girl would not drink anything that came from the tap even when Tino added a filter. She claimed it tasted like very bad medicine. There was no convincing a four-year-old that highly mineralized well water was probably better for her than anything that came in a plastic bottle. Most of the time I just gave in, handed her the “fuzzy” water and hoped her baby teeth would last long enough for her to get her permanent ones.

  “Mama?” Stella again.

  I was about to run out and get the seltzer—anything to get Stella to be quiet for a minute—when Ivy’s head nearly disappeared into the toilet. Again. The sound of her emptying her stomach bounced off the walls of the tiny room. I swallowed three more times to keep my own breakfast down.

  “There’s blood, Mama.” This was from Ivy.

  “Stella! Go find your coat.”

  I knew my younger daughter would heed this command. She was always looking for a reason to be outside no matter how hot or cold or rainy or snowy the weather.

  My little one truly belonged in Puerto Rico. I blinked away the thought.

  Tino and I had made the decision twelve years ago to plant roots in this cold, damp city. I needed to be okay with it once and for all. A pang of longing for home pierced me so deep the pain almost felt real.

  I shook it off.

  For now I needed to put blinders on. Get Ivy help so she could be better. So she wasn’t sick all the time. Then maybe, maybe I could approach Tino with the idea of moving back. He’d dragged us up here all this way to get his foot in the door at Strohmeyer’s main brewery headquarters. After more than a decade of him working and waiting and hoping for more than token advancement, I wasn’t sure if it was worth it.

  Stella ran back into the bathroom, her little pink coat zipped and buckled in all the right places. Her purple hat was tipped at a jaunty angle that surely wasn’t intentional. She had a rainbow glove on one hand, a sparkly white mitten on the other. At any moment other than this one, I’d have wanted to hug and kiss her. Praise her for trying and nearly succeeding. Pat her on the head just for being cute. I never thought I’d love her as much as Ivy, but I did.

  The hard part no one tells you about motherhood is that each of your children will need very different things from you. And sometimes…sometimes, you have to sacrifice one for the other.

  “Can I go make a snowman?” A small hand encased in yarn awkwardly patted my thigh.

  “Snowman?”

  I tipped the flusher, wet the towel some more, and gave it to Ivy. I leaned over my older daughter’s back, caught the cord in my fingers and pulled up the blinds. The snow was nearly to the sill. I tried to look beyond the window but was blinded by only whiteness. It hadn’t looked that bad a half hour ago. I was sure that there’d only been an inch surrounding the space where Tino’s car had been. That had to be a drift.

  Snow that high would mean we were blocked in. My only way to get Ivy to a hospital would be by ambulance. My final check from Spasy wouldn’t come close to covering that out-of-pocket fee. I tried to remember if the snow blew on this side of the house and the depth was an illusion.

  Eight years. That’s how long we’d been here, and I still wasn’t quite used to having our little part of the American dream. Truth be told, I very much missed our apartment in Tremont. But when the young bearded guys with their coffee and the yoga-pants-wearing women with their cupcake shops had moved in, this house mortgage had become a lot cheaper than our last rent increase.

  Most importantly, it made Tino happy. If Tino wasn’t happy, no one was happy.

  From our old apartment it would have only been two miles to the big MetroHealth hospital. I could have left Stella with any of the abuelas in our building. Focused on Ivy without the guilt of ignoring my other daughter.

  Instead, I had to tell Stella that no, she couldn’t build a snowman, though that was a very reasonable request from a not-yet-in-school four-year-old. Normally I’d have dropped Stella at day care before taking Ivy to the hospital, but if the snow was anything like it looked from that one tiny window, I wouldn’t have time to get her there before Ivy needed that ambulance I couldn’t afford.

  I glanced out the window one more time hoping for some kind of salvation. None was forthcoming. I took a deep breath, closed the blinds, and got to it.

  I worked hard to get Stella buckled into her car seat, something she vehemently hated. Then I needed to usher Ivy into the car and to the emergency room, something my older daughter vehemently hated.

  All that with a thick layer of recent lake-effect snow on top.

  Forty minutes later, we were all buckled in the car. The driveway was shoveled sufficiently for me to get down to the nearly empty street, but the fat flakes were still falling hard and fast. When I’d learned to drive as a kid in Ponce, my biggest worry had been dodging tree branches during tropical thunderstorms, not frozen water during a snowstorm. When I’d mentioned how beautiful I thought it was to our neighbors, here from Puerto Rico before us, they’d shaken their heads and muttered under their collective breaths. It hadn’t taken me long to figure out that pretty was also treacherous.

  As I carefully backed out onto our street, an SUV roared around the corner, nearly hitting us. I floored the gas until my spinning tires found traction and pulled us back into the driveway.

  “Mama?” Stella asked. “I thought we were going to the doctor.”

  Ivy was silent, but I could feel her steady gaze along the side of my face from her spot in the passenger seat. I didn’t say a word to either of them until my hands and feet stopped trembling long enough that I could put the car in reverse and try again.

  Between the time
the SUV had nearly sideswiped us and me backing out a second time, a Brighthill village plow had thundered down the street. Now I had to add getting over the hump of snow at the end of the driveway to my list of morning challenges. Once I did that though, the street should be smooth sailing. I took a deep breath, floored the gas, and got us safely onto the heavily salted pavement.

  Three minutes into the drive, Stella said, “Mama? I have to pee.”

  “You’re going to have to hold it, niña,” I said. At the stoplight at the end of West Fourth Street, I flicked on the left blinker and looked between my older daughter in the passenger seat and my younger reflected in the rearview mirror.

  I don’t regret having Stella. It’s not that I don’t love her fiercely—just differently from Ivy. Two children are a lot, though. Especially when one needs extra attention.

  After Stella was born, the number of hours in the day had not increased accordingly. I don’t know how anyone did this, how my mother had managed three girls with only a year between each of us.

  After Ivy, I hadn’t wanted a second. Tino had pushed and pushed—for years.

  “They’ll play with each other,” he’d said. “You’ll have a break from being only Ivy’s mom.”

  “Ivy shouldn’t grow up alone,” he’d said on a different night while whispering sexy words into my ear and saying there were no more condoms.

  I’d finally given in on a night when I’d been drunk on Jamaican rum and high on love.

  “When we’re gone, siblings have each other,” he’d huffed while he’d been thrusting, another time without any barriers between us.

  Those were the sweet nothings he’d whispered in my ear right before we’d conceived our second daughter. When he hadn’t been around to help care for her those first hard lonely months when my mother had already been promised to my sister and my new niece, he’d said, “I’m just getting a foothold at Strohmeyer.”