Innocence

“The autopsy report said accidental. I say murder. He ate some creamed honey, spread it thick on scones. It was contaminated with cardiac glycosides, oldedrin, and nerioside, because the bees had harvested the nectar from oleander bushes, which are as poisonous as anything on Earth. Considering the dose he received, a few minutes after finishing the scones, he would have broken into a sweat, vomited violently, passed out, and died of respiratory paralysis.”

As she found another document that she wanted to add to the memory stick, I said, “But it does sound accidental, doesn’t it? To me, it does, anyway.”

“My father was an experienced beekeeper and honeymaker. So were the people he exchanged honey with. It can’t have happened. Not with all their experience. The deadly honey was the only contaminated jar in his pantry, the only one containing poison. That was wholesome honey once, and later someone added oleander nectar.”

“Who would do that?”

“A piece of human debris named J. Ryan Telford.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me.”

In its silken gloom, the murderer’s office retained its air of elegance, of privilege waiting to be enjoyed, of authority waiting to be exercised. But now the sensuous lines of the lacquered furniture, revealed largely by reflections of pale light along the sleek curves of exotic woods, suggested a room as sinister as it was elegant.

More than eighteen years since I’d seen it in the store window, the tuxedoed marionette rose again in memory. The most strange and disquieting conviction overcame me: that if I were to switch on the lights just then, I would discover the loose-jointed puppet sitting on the sofa, watching me as I watched Gwyneth at the murderer’s computer.

16

THAT NIGHT IN THE LONESOME OCTOBER, IN THE early weeks of my ninth year, with Mother dead by her own hand, the body perhaps not yet discovered, I arrived in a manufacturing district, cradled in machinery of unknown purpose. The trucker parked his rig in a fenced lot, and after listening and observing for half an hour to be sure the way was safe, I slipped from under the tarp, climbed the chain-link, and set foot in a city for the first time in my life.

The scale of the human accomplishment all around me, seen previously only in magazines and a few books, inspired in me such awe that I would have scurried along those streets with my head down, humbled and heart pounding, even if I had not needed to hide my face to protect myself. I had not known where the truck would take me. I had not prepared myself for the shock of civilization in such an insistent form as this metropolis.

The industrial buildings and warehouses were immense and seemed for the most part old, dirty, worn. Dark windows, others broken and boarded over, suggested that a few of those structures might be abandoned. Occasionally a streetlamp was out, and those that worked were dim because their globes were filthy. Litter collected in the gutters, billows of foul-smelling steam rose from a grate in the pavement, but the scene was no less glamorous for all of that.

I was at the same time fearful and exhilarated, alone in a place as alien as a world at the farther end of the galaxy would have been, yet electrified by a sense of possibilities that might transform in positive ways even a life as hedged with threats as mine. A part of me thought that it would be a miracle if I survived a day here, but another part of me nurtured the hope that in the countless thousands of buildings and byways, there would be forgotten nooks and passages where I might hide and move about, and even thrive.

At that hour, in that year, few of the factories ran graveyard shifts, and the night was quiet. Except for a passing truck now and then, I proceeded all but alone through that rough district. The nearly deserted and dimly lighted streets gave me more cover than I had expected, although I knew that I would eventually come to a more lively—and potentially deadly—neighborhood.

In time I crossed an iron bridge that accommodated both vehicles and pedestrians. On the broad black river far below, the running lights of barges and other boats appeared fantastic to me. Although I knew what they were, they looked less like vessels than like luminous creatures of the water, gliding dreamily past not on the surface but just beneath it, on journeys even more enigmatic than my own.

As I walked, I kept my attention mostly on the river, because ahead of me rose the lighted towers of the city center, a sparkling phantasmagoria at once enchanting and flat-out terrifying, which I could handle only in quick glimpses. On and on they went in serried ranks, stone and steel and glass, of such great mass that it seemed the land beneath them should sink or that the whole world should be tipped by their cumulative weight into a new angle of rotation.