Pot of Poison (Hour of My Evil Twin)

Mom was at the hospital working the graveyard shift, and I was alone in the sweltering house. I turned off the air-conditioning as soon as she left for work, trying to save money. On hot nights like this, going to bed felt like I was pitching a tent in a toaster oven. But, in view of my spectacular failure to pay my share of the mortgage, it seemed like the least I could do. Summer was getting on, and it had been months since the dust had tasted rain. Wildfire season had started: a twenty thousand acre blaze in the Sierra foothills, and closer to home big grass fires were burning near Gilroy and Vacaville and Palo Alto. Dozens of smaller fires had left patches of blackened grass along the freeways all the way into San Francisco.

I changed into my lightest PJs, but after a second I decided not to take off the good luck charm my boyfriend, Victor, had given me—a Chinese coin threaded on a slim silver chain. He said he’d picked it up at the hospital gift shop earlier in the day. The unfamiliar weight swung and bumped against my collar bone as I trudged into the bathroom to splash my face with cold water. The eyes looking back at me from the mirror were bloodshot and exhausted. I shambled back into my bedroom and opened the window wide. There was no breeze, just the smell of burning, as if someone in the distance was holding a match to the darkness and waiting for it to catch.

I shoved the blankets off my bed and lay down on top of the sheets to wait for sleep. It had only been ten hours since I’d seen a man shot. Every time I closed my eyes I saw him looking at his bloody chest in surprise: the red blood soaking into the carpet and spattered on the wallpaper behind him. In the darkness the scorched air smelled like gunpowder.

The dead man’s name was Tsao. The last thing he said before he died was, “Cathy, I will love you forever.”

They say love warms the soul, but it burns it sometimes, too.

It was after midnight when I gave up trying to sleep. I crawled out of bed, turned on the bedroom light and closed my window. I dug a perfume bottle out of my purse and sat on the end of my bed to examine it. The bottle was almost round, shaped like a piece of crystal fruit, an apple or a peach. The heavy stopper had been fashioned into a stem with one leaf still clinging to it. The liquid inside was the color of sunlight with a teaspoon of blood mixed in.

I brought the bottle of perfume up close to my face and took out the stopper. I used to smell things by leaning in and sorta sucking air through my nose, like most people do, but when I was being trained as a perfume demonstrator at the mall they told me you actually get more fragrance if you breathe normally with your mouth a little open and waft the air toward you with your hand. I let the scent curl around me, a sweet odor like peaches with an ugly little undertone of formaldehyde and smoke. It smelled like desire without hope. Like angels burning.

My phone rang, and I picked it up instantly, thinking it would be someone in trouble, Emma or Victor. I was half right.

“You stole my perfume,” said an angry voice with a sharp Texas twang.

“Hey, it’s my Evil Twin, Jewel.” The last time we were in a room together, ten hours ago, she was the one who killed Tsao. Then she took the money out of his wallet and forced me to give her my driver’s license at gunpoint. I had been hoping I would never hear from her again. This is known as wishful thinking. “Gee, it’s great to hear your voice,” I said. In the background I could hear drunk people talking, bottles clinking, and the steady thud-thud of loud obnoxious dance music. “Where are you calling from?”

“Payphone at the Baptist church,” Jewel said. “Listen, you took that perfume out of my purse this afternoon.”

“No way,” I said, turning the crystal bottle in my hands. “That would be stealing.” Strictly speaking, the liquid in the bottle wasn’t really perfume, it was a very special sort of poison—a complex chemical agent that took away the gift of immortality. My life had suffered a sudden and surprising infestation of immortals—my father, my boyfriend, and my boyfriend’s angry ex-boss, Ancestor Lu, to name but a few—so to tell you the truth, there was something very comforting about holding that little pot of poison. In a small, mean way it felt good to think that with one well-timed spritz those godlike beings with eternal lives, lightning reflexes, and supernatural healing abilities could be reduced to ordinary human status again, at the mercy of pain and time and death like the rest of us. “Maybe you just forgot where you put it,” I said. “For example, I can’t find my driver’s license.”

“Very funny.” I could hear Jewel stop to take a drink of something. “Have the cops showed up yet?”

“Not yet.” Ever since I got home I had been wondering if I was about to get a visit from the Flat Feet of the Law. Because of an incident a few months back, the police had my fingerprints on file. If they got a good print from the hotel room, it was only a matter of time until their computers would identify me as a person of interest in Tsao’s murder. Technically speaking I was innocent, but lying to the police is always dangerous, and telling them the truth—that my boyfriend’s immortal father had a crush on me but was shot to death by my evil twin after having been dosed with a secret mortality serum—that was obviously a non-starter.

Jewel turned her mouth away from the phone. “Barkeep,” she said. “Hey, Numb Nuts—yeah, you. Gimme another beer. Okay, I’m back. No cops, huh? Well, that might be good, or it might be bad.” She chugged thoughtfully on her beer. “Good version, maybe you just didn’t leave a lot of prints.”

“What’s the bad version?”

“Well, Tsao told me Ancestor Lu has some real spooky computer guys who can make things like police records just disappear. They might have wiped out your old fingerprint files.”

“Why would Ancestor Lu do me a favor?”

“He wouldn’t,” Jewel said dryly. “The bad version is that Lu wants to take you out himself, and you’re easier to whack if you aren’t locked up in a nice secure jail cell.”

I swallowed. “Ah.”

“How’s Denny?” Jewel asked. “Did you get him to a doctor?” Denny was Jewel’s brother. Tsao had broken his arm earlier in the day. The last thing Jewel said before she killed Tsao was, “Nobody hits my brother but me.”

“He’s in the hospital. I was there until a couple of hours ago. He won’t be playing the piano anytime soon, but he’ll live.”

“Listen, Cathy, you got to get him to head back to Texas. If he don’t get back, the you-know-what’s gonna hit the fan with his probation officer.”

“Loyalty’s a big thing with your brother, Jewel. He’s not going to leave you here.”

“I know it. That’s why you’re going to tell him you talked to me and I was already back home.” Rap music pounded and thumped from Jewel’s end of the phone.

“So, you’re calling from a church,” I said.

“He can tell when I’m lying but he’s sweet on you. He doesn’t know any better.”

“Jewel—”

“Hey,” she said sharply. “You drug my brother into this mess, Cathy. You get him out. Do it first thing tomorrow,” she added. “I want to make sure he gets the message before Ancestor Lu’s people take you out.” Then she hung up.

It took me quite a while to get to sleep.

Excerpted from CATHY'S RING: If Found Call (650) 266-8263 © Copyright 2011. Reprinted with permission by Running Press. All rights reserved.