Клэр Донелли - Last Licks

When Sunny had seated herself in the chair, Luke made a big, swooping gesture, taking in the whole place. “It ain’t Scatterwell Castle, or whatever they call it, but it’s home.”

He dropped onto the sofa.

“We tried to catch up with you earlier this evening, but you were just a little bit ahead of us when we left.” Sunny paused for a moment, trying to figure out what to say. “I guess I wanted to apologize. That’s not the way people are supposed to talk—or act—around here.”

“Why should I be surprised at Alfred?” Luke asked. “He didn’t act much better around his uncle.” He took a deep breath. “It was hard to hear all that stuff.”

“About your friend?” Sunny said. “I’m sorry. I know that you liked Gardner, and he certainly seemed to like you.”

“Yeah. Liked,” Luke echoed and then launched into a seemingly unrelated story. “My mom died about a year ago. Something her potions couldn’t cure. I managed to get the word and return to the commune before she went. She gave me her book of cures”—he gestured to a battered spiral notebook sitting on the table—“and she finally told me something I’d been asking her about for years.”

He sagged back on the couch, looking at Sunny. “You know that saying, ‘It takes a village’? I was raised by thirty-seven people on the commune. But I never had a father. My mom had an ‘old man’ for a while, and especially when she was younger, she had a lot of, well, let’s call them overnight guests.”

“That must have been . . .” Sunny ran out of words.

“Weird?” Luke suggested. “Hard?” He shook his head. “Actually, it was just life. There was a guy in the commune, Paul, who was a carpenter and woodworker. He was what you’d probably call my role model.” Luke laughed. “He believed in doing a good job and not taking any crap . . . and he also loved to sing. He was really into music—got me my first guitar by trading a table he’d made for it. I can’t complain about my life. There was just one thing. Whenever I asked Mom, she always changed the subject . . . until she lay dying.”

“So who was he?” Sunny asked, afraid she knew the answer. Luke laughed—not exactly a happy sound. “That was the thing; she didn’t know. As far as she could narrow it down, he was one of two guys, fresh out of Yale, who were on a road trip. They crashed with Mom, got kind of wasted, and I guess you can fill in the rest.”

He moved ponderously on the couch, but his voice got clearer. Maybe his drinks were wearing off. “All I had were first names, and the fact that they came from Maine. So I played detective, managed to get my hands on Yale alumni lists. There are a couple of thousand alums in Maine, but I was looking for people from the class of 1970 and finally managed to find a Hank and a Gardner. One was a doctor who ran Bridgewater Hall. I had a degree in music therapy, had good references . . . and was willing to work cheap. After getting the gig, I just kept my eyes open. It was just a stroke of luck for me that Gardner also happened to be a patient there. I managed to snag a tissue when Dr. Reese had a bloody nose, then I got hold of a couple of glasses that Gardner had drunk from, which was a hell of a lot easier. I sent them off to one of those mail-in DNA places, and here’s the answer, postmarked about a month ago.” He tapped a finger on a couple of letters lying beside the notebook. “Modern science says there’s a ninety-nine percent chance that Gardner was my father.”

“So you found him.” Sunny couldn’t think of anything else to say as she tried to digest all of Luke’s revelations.

“And I was even happy. Dr. Reese, well, he came off as a bit of a stiff. It was a relief to find out that Gardner was my dad. He seemed cheerful, even if he was on his back most of the time. He always had a smile and a joke. I was glad I’d found him.” Luke fell silent for a moment. “But all I knew was the sick guy at Bridgewater Hall. When I heard all that stuff people were whispering at the memorial, what Alfred said out loud, I had to wonder. Was I a chump to come looking for him?”

“People are rarely all one thing or all the other,” Sunny pointed out. “If he was nice to you, enthusiastic, maybe he liked you. Maybe he wanted you to think well of him—to remember the good in him.” She hesitated. “Did you tell him?”

Luke shook his shaggy head. “I was sort of edging toward it, working up to it. I almost told him the night he died. See, I did take some time off from pushing papers around and went to see him. He’d been complaining about feeling nervous, but they wouldn’t give him anything for it. So I mixed up some of Mom’s nerve tonic and smuggled it in for him, gave him a dose—”

“In a glass of brandy,” Sunny finished, remembering Ollie’s story.

“The stuff tastes awfully strong, and I thought that would cut it a bit. Gardner used to say a good snort was probably as good as a sleeping pill.” He stopped, blinking. “How’d you know about that?”

“Ollie woke up and overheard a little while you were visiting with Gardner.” Sunny looked over at the wreck of a notebook. “What was in that tonic?”

Luke reached over and turned tattered pages. “Here it is.” He passed the book over to Sunny. Luke’s mom had unformed, loopy, hard-to-read handwriting that started large on the top lines and progressively shrank as she got closer to the bottom of the page.

“What is this—‘toxic’?” Sunny pointed at a word.

Luke tried to focus. “No, ‘tonic.’”

They ended up sitting together on the couch, trying to decipher the recipe. It only got harder as the letters got smaller. “What is this here? ‘Stop’? Or maybe ‘Stup’?”

“Steep, like you do with a teabag. In this case, you do it more than once to draw some bad stuff out of the monkshood.”

“That was my next question. I thought it was ‘mink stool.’”

“No, definitely monkshood,” Luke told her. “‘Steep monkshood 2X’—two times.”

Sunny peered more closely. “Okay, I can see the rest. But that ‘2X’—I think that’s a seven.”

“No, it’s a two. Do it twice.” He bent over the notebook, “See? There’s a bottom on the two . . . or is that the crosspiece on the T in the next line? Oh, man, don’t tell me I got it wrong.”

Sunny sat very still, her face pale. “Luke,” she said gently, “monkshood is pretty dangerous stuff. My mom had some in a corner of her garden. But she rooted it all out when I was very little because she caught me trying to taste a flower. Mom really freaked out. Have you ever made that tonic before?”

Luke shook his head. “I just followed the recipe. I really don’t remember exactly what I did now. If I screwed it up—do you think I brought on the attack that Gardner had? It’s not the first time I gave him the stuff—he seemed fine the next day. Look, here’s the leftover tonic.” He went to the kitchen counter and returned with a small bottle of clear fluid. Sunny accepted it into her palm. She didn’t want to get any fingerprints messed up.

“I think we’d better have this checked out,” Sunny told him.

“Yeah.” Luke wasn’t just getting more sober with every passing minute. He was getting paler and scareder. “I just wanted to know my father—to do a favor for him. People are going to think I was after his money. That’s the last thing I wanted.”

“I’ll get this to a doctor.” She got a pen and wrote down a phone number. “And this is a lawyer I know. I think you’d better call him.”

16

Sunny drove throughthe darkness, the bottle of nerve tonic lying on the seat beside her in a plastic bag. The moment she left Luke’s apartment building, she’d gone to call Will, only to realize that her cell phone was in the pocket of her black jacket—which was still on the passenger’s seat in Will’s pickup. So she drove home at a very sedate speed, not wanting to even jostle the evidence.