“Does Asher know you have the journal?”
“He clearly suspects it.”
“Then what makes you think he won’t come back for it once he’s out on bail?”
“I’ll get a restraining order.”
“Oh well, in that case,” Tariq said sarcastically. “You’ll have a piece of paper to protect you. What a relief.”
“What would you suggest, Tariq? My apartment will be quite secure with the new locks, and he’s not a cat burglar, so unlikely to come in through my windows. He now knows I have pepper spray and will use it. You want me to borrow Ellen’s gun? Would that make you happy?”
“Not really. All he’d have to do is get it away from you and you’d be much worse off.”
“That’s kind of my point. I appreciate your concern, and I don’t take the threat Asher poses lightly. But I won’t live as a prisoner because some man has decided he has the right to threaten me.”
“I hear what you’re saying,” Tariq said. “I don’t like it, but I get it.”
After they ordered a tres leches crème brûlée to share for dessert, Harper excused herself to use the restroom. She brushed her hair and twisted it into a bun, securing it with a couple of No. 2 pencils. She took her glasses case from her bag and slipped on her old pair of black-rimmed glasses.
Upon returning to the table, she murmured in a husky voice: “Someone here order a naughty schoolteacher fantasy?”
Tariq slept like a corpse: on his back with his hands folded over his chest.
Harper fell asleep for a while but woke up in the small hours of the night. Usually the sound of rain against the windowpanes was soothing, but she couldn’t get her mind off Delilah and Soren’s journal. When she and Tariq returned to her apartment last night, she had retrieved it from Ellen’s safe and set it on the table next to her computer so she could study it first thing in the morning.
After half an hour of trying but failing to go back to sleep, Harper gave in to her racing thoughts.Technically, it’s morning. Careful not to wake Tariq, she slipped out of bed, settled in at her table, switched on a small desk lamp illuminating the Louise Glück poem, and opened the journal.
Speak to me, tell me your secrets.
On what looked like it had been Soren Perles’s original first page, he had inscribed:
Venenum est in pondere. Medicamentum in veneno est
The poison is in the dose. Medication is in the poison
Harper winced when she saw Delilah had used a garish green highlighter on many of Soren Perle’s notes, especially those that mentioned Isabel, and the baby. She had made comments, tiny sketches, and recipe notes on almost every page. Constance Bell would be appalled at the mistreatment of the historical document, but it did make it easier for Harper to start piecing things together.
The rumors appeared to be true: Soren and Isabel Perles had been involved in an incestuous relationship. Andaccording to what she could glean from Delilah’s scrawled notes and marginalia, so were Delilah and Asher. Not currently, but years ago, as children. She had written:
He won’t stop, he won’t let me go.
He says he still loves me like that.
I’ve told him it’s wrong, that I want a normal life.
Why won’t he leave me alone?
A folie à deux, indeed. Had Delilah been trying to get away from Asher ever since they were young?
Were these scrawled messages the reason Asher had become so furious that time in the basement? Could jealousy, mixed with a desire to keep his behavior a secret, have motivated him to murder his sister? Because if he couldn’t have her, no one could? And did Asher then eliminate the ghost tour leader because Joel knew the secret?
Harper kept reading, the story of Soren and Isabel Perles gradually coming into focus.
After failing his medical school exams at Harvard, Soren returned to Monterey, bringing his medical cabinet on the train with him and presenting himself as a doctor. Which, in many ways, he was. Plenty of physicians at that time had been trained by another physician, rather than at a medical school, and Soren at least had some academic training.
According to his lab notes, Soren was trying to understand human anatomy and biological systems at a time when germ theory was unknown and many of his contemporaries still attributed disease to bad humors. It was not unusual for medical students at Harvard to have to dig up their own specimens—in fact, it was so common that laws were passed in an attempt to prevent it. But the journal revealed that Sorenhad continued the practice upon returning to Monterey. It certainly would explain all the bones strewn around his basement laboratory.
He thought, among other things, that his mastery of science would somehow endear Isabel to him, but it seemed to do the opposite:
