Steven James - The Knight

After he’d removed the psychedelic drugs from the toads, he consulted a toxicology textbook to determine how much poison he would need for a lethal dose and found that he had more than enough bufotoxin to kill six people, let alone two.

Reading the description of the symptoms was very informative: hallucinations, vomiting, seizures, paralysis, and then ventricular fibrillation. As one book put it:

Often the hallucinations involve the sensation of bugs crawling across the victim’s skin or out of the bodily orifices. Frequently, those experiencing these symptoms will scratch furiously at their skin or attempt to scrub, slice or burn the bugs away.

So, it looked like the next two victims would die just as dramatically as Simona and Pasquino did in Emilia’s story, the seventh tale told on day four.

Given the delivery method he’d chosen, Giovanni couldn’t be certain if his victims would fatally poison themselves tonight or in the morning, but he was relatively certain that both of them would be dead before noon tomorrow.

Based on their habits, they would be away from home this afternoon. He could place the poison then. And if they changed their pattern, he would alter his plan. Maybe slip over later tonight while they were asleep. Either way, the story would play out just as it was supposed to.

The tragic squeaking and scratching of the last dying rat caught his attention. He watched it until it stopped quivering, just like he’d watched his grandmother stop twitching so many years before.

Finally, the rat stared wide-eyed and unblinking at the world, just like Grandma Nadine had done.

Just like all the people over the years in the different tales he’d told.

The snake opened its jaws and began to swallow its meal.

Giovanni laid the two syringes full of bufotoxin in a narrow metal case, snapped it shut, and slipped it into his duffel bag.

Then he left the storage facility and, since he had a few arrangements to make before the last four stories began, drove to his place of employment where no one knew, no one had any idea, who he really was.

And where, in the greatest irony of all, he was trusted implicitly with people’s lives every day.

Tessa was showered, dressed, and sitting at my parents’ kitchen table waiting for me when I arrived at their house with the diary.

She was sipping a glass of chilled orange juice and had a half-eaten grapefruit in front of her, and although I expected her to ask me where I’d been or complain that I’d dragged her out of bed and made her change in the car, all she said was, “So, um… do you have it?”

I couldn’t think of anything touching or profound to say, so I simply handed Christie’s diary to her and watched her reaction.

She accepted it quietly, stared at it. Turned it over in her hands.

Christie had used her diary partly as a scrapbook, pasting snippets of letters, notes, and postcards inside, all of which made the book fat and lumpy and left the binding straining at the lock. But it gave the diary character, and by the look on Tessa’s face, it seemed to appeal to her inquisitive nature.

After a few moments when she didn’t say anything, I asked her, “Where’s Martha?”

“At church.” Tessa still hadn’t looked up from the diary.

“She left you alone?”

“She asked if I wanted her to stay home, but I told her I’d be safe with those two undercover cops in the car across the street watching the house.”

“How did you-?”

She rolled her eyes. “Puh-lease.”

OK, so I would need to have a little talk with those two officers.

“So, you fly out today again?” Tessa was looking at the diary, but speaking to me.

“I need to leave for the airport at about 2:30. I’m hoping to be back tomorrow evening.”

“And then we leave for DC pretty much after that.” She didn’t state it as a question.

It was possible that my testimony in Chicago would affect the timing of our trip to DC, but I decided I could deal with all that later. “We’re scheduled to leave on Wednesday. Yes.” She didn’t reply. I tapped her shoulder gently. “All right, well, fill me in when you’re done reading it, OK?”

“I will.”

Then, leaving the glass of OJ and the remains of the grapefruit behind, she took the diary upstairs to the bedroom my parents let her use when I’m out of town.

Despite her overwhelming curiosity, Tessa stared at the diary for a long time before opening it.

When Patrick had first told her about it, she’d been angry, angry, so angry that he’d kept it from her, but then when he told her that her mom hadn’t wanted him to give it to her until her eighteenth birthday, she stopped being angry and became something else.

Curious, yes.

Maybe a little afraid.

But why? What was she afraid of?

She stared at it, ran her fingers across the weathered cover.

She kept this from you. Your mom kept it from you.

She didn’t want you to know about it until you were eighteen.

But why not?

Tessa slipped the key into the lock. Her heart began to run like a rabbit through her chest as she turned the key, clicked open the clasp. Flipped to the first entry.

November 2

Dear Diary,

I’m not really sure why I’m doing this, writing to you, I mean, starting a diary. I guess I’m hoping you’ll be a place for me to just be myself, the real me, the person no one ever really seems to notice. I guess it’s good to have a place like that. I don’t know. It’s hard to be honest with people sometimes, maybe I can at least be honest with you.

A place to be real.

Nice.

Based on the date, Tessa realized that her mother had started the journal when she was seventeen-the same age that she was now.

You were conceived two years later.

She was tempted to jump around, skim over the entries, kind of like scrolling through someone’s blog to see if you really wanted to read the whole thing or not, but she already knew that she wanted to read every page, and, just like reading any book, you cheat yourself if you skip to the end. You miss all the surprises.

“Hey, Tessa.” It was Patrick, calling from the first floor. “I left my laptop at home. I have a few things to check on and then I have a meeting at 1:00. You’ll be all right?”

“Uh-huh,” she hollered through the door of her room.

“I’ll see you this afternoon before I fly out. I’ve still got your cell, OK?”

“Yeah. Just tell those two cops not to be quite so obtrusive.”

A pause. “I will. Call me if you need me.”

“OK.”

Then Tessa turned to the diary’s second entry and began to read.

I had a quick and rather blunt word with the two officers who were supposed to be watching my parents’ house undercover, and then I drove home to pick up my laptop.

Using Tessa’s cell I dialed in to my account and checked my voicemail, but my mailbox was empty. When I checked hers, I found a dozen text messages from her friends at school. I wanted her to be able to access them, so I programmed the phone to automatically forward all her messages to her email account.

Then I called the warden from the Waupun Correctional Institution, the maximum security penitentiary in Wisconsin where Basque had spent most of the thirteen years of his incarceration.

I caught Warden Schuler at home grilling steaks for his family, and he made sure he let me know how happy he was that I was disturbing him on a Sunday morning, but I told him it would only take a minute, and then asked if I could get a look at the letters Basque had received while he was in prison.

“Sure, if we had ’em.”

“What do you mean?”

“Basque ripped ’em up and flushed ’em.”