LUCA

Alone in his room, Luca tried to sleep curled up in the chair Haze had paid for but never seen. Once, Luca loved the curvy softness of the red velvet. Now it felt cheap, a tawdry reminder. He could hear Charlotte and Martin laughing in the kitchen. His little white lie had lightened them—and why shouldn’t it? There was no point in them carrying that burden around with them. He was strong enough to shoulder it on his own.

He wanted to get up, to move, but he couldn’t. Instead, he bent over and pulled the small box out from under the bed. He looked through the cellophane window. The mushroom had shriveled to about a third its original size; it was no longer creamy beige, the cap had turned dark brown. He could still see where he had cut small chunks out of it.

Martin was right. It was lethal. He hadn’t lied about the night Haze died; he hadn’t fed it to him then. He’d fed it to him little by little over time. It was no big deal to prepare. He’d mixed bits into canned soup or Haze’s damned crème brulee. The book in Martin’s study said death by Amanita was slow and excruciating: flu-like symptoms first, followed by a breakdown of the internal organs over a period of weeks, less if the victim was unhealthy to begin with.

Luca had saved the leftover, his insurance policy, just in case things didn’t work out. But things had worked out. One way, or the other, things always worked out for him.

“Tomorrow morning,” he told the mushroom, “I’m going to burn you up.”

He was tired, too tired to get up, too tired to eat. He relaxed back into the chair and thought about Charlotte’s face. She really did have a lovely face, heart-shaped—something he hadn’t noticed until recently. There was a glimmer of her before the heart grew thin, the eyes hollowed out and the mouth turned down. It was Randall Asbury, a death mask. There was no point belaboring that. Then the face grew round and the eyes narrowed and morphed into Haze Morton, not his face the night he died; his face the night he and Luca first met in San Francisco. He was leering. Luca leered back.