'Not unless they were abused on the street. Did you come across anything like that?'
'No, and I combed the psychopharm indices. In minute dosages, atropine and scopolamine are relaxants, and they're used in over-the-counter medicines - sleep remedies; allergy potions; those little patches you put behind your ear to combat seasickness. But years ago they were prescribed in higher concentrations, and there were major side effect problems. Scopolamine was given to women in labour in order to help them forget the pain. They mixed it with morphine and called it twilight sleep. But it damaged the foetus and caused psychotic attacks in some patients. Atropine was used for Parkinson's disease as an antispasmodic. It reduced the tremors, but patients started to become pseudosenile - forgetful, confused, and paranoid - a real problem until they developed synthetic drugs with milder side effects.'
Pseudosenility. That recalled something - the shadow of a memory - but it darted through my mind like a minnow and hid behind a rock.
'And at the turn of the century,' she went on, 'there used to be something called antiasthma cigarettes, belladonna blended with tobacco. Dilated the bronchioles, but too many puffs and it caused major freak-outs: delirium, hallucinations, and profound memory loss. Which is another important point: Anticholinergics destroy the memory. If Jamey were stoned on them, you could pick him up, set
him down, manipulate him like a puppet. Ask him about it the next day, and he'd have forgotten all about it.'
She stopped, caught her breath, and opened her notebook.
'Something else,' she said, flipping pages rapidly. 'I found this little ditty on the symptoms of belladonna poisoning and copied it down.'
She handed me the book, and I read out loud:
'Mad as a hatter, dry as a bone, red as a beet, and blind as a stone.'
'Dry mouth and flushing,' I said. 'Parasympathetic effects.'
'Yes! And when I read it, I remembered the day Jamey got all agitated in group. And the other times I saw him freaking out. Alex, during each episode, he was highly flushed). Red as a beet! Breathing hard! I'm sure I mentioned it.'
'You did.' And so had Sarita Flowers. And Dwight Cadmus, describing the night Jamey had torn apart his library. I concentrated and reeled in the exact words: red and puffy and breathing hard.
Looking at the books she'd collected, I asked:
'Anything there on drug interactions?'
She extracted a thick red volume and handed it to me.
I turned to the section on anti-Parkinsonian drugs and scanned it. The warning to physicians was midway through the paragraph on counterindications and had been placed in a black-bordered rectangle:
Anticholinergics were potentiated by Thorazine.
Administration of most of the standard antipsychotic transquillisers could prove harmful, even fatal, to Parkinson's patients and others who'd been given atropine or one of its derivatives, scrambling the nervous system and creating intense deleria and pseudomadness. Pseudosenility.
That set the minnow free and allowed me to net it: The throwaway I'd picked up that first night in the lobby of the hospital - The Canyon Oaks Quarterly - had featured an article on anticholinergic syndrome in the elderly, the misdiagnosis of senility caused by drug-induced psychosis
If Jamey had indeed been poisoned with belladonna derivatives, the drug Mainwaring had pumped into him in the name of treatment had plunged him into a man-made hell. The evil doctor scenario was looking better and better.
I put the book down and tried to look calm.
'This is it, isn't it?' said Jennifer.
'It fits,' I said, 'but you'd need brugmansia clones to pull it off. Where would you get hold of something like that?'
'From someone who'd been to the jungle,' she said, 'before they bulldozed through it. A botanist or explorer.'
I picked up the Stanford monograph and scanned it. At the end of the text were several pages of photographs. One of them caught my eye.
It was a stone carving, an idol used in a hallucinogenic burial rite. I looked at it more closely: a squatting toad with the face of a slit-eyed human, a plumed helmet atop the rough-hewn head. Crude yet strangely powerful.
I'd seen one just like it not too long ago.
Turning quickly to the front of the monograph, I read the names of the authors: Andrew J. McAllister, Ronald D. Levine, Heather J. Palmer.
Heather J. Palmer. A name out of a newspaper clipping. A June wedding in Palo Alto. The bride's mother was a stalwart of the DAR. Her late father, the diplomat, had served in Colombia, Brazil, and Panama, where the bride had been born.
The future Mrs. Dwight Cadmus had done field work after all.
'THE AUNT,' said Milo. 'Jesus. This case is a goddamn cancer. Every time you turn around, it's spread somewhere else.'
He warmed his hands on the coffee mug, took a bite of bagel, and went back to reading the McAllister monograph.
The rains had started late in the afternoon, gathering strength with ferocious haste, courtesy of a tropical storm blown inland. The last time it had come down this hard, the canyons had turned to fudge sauce and a healthy chunk of Malibu had been washed into the ocean. Despite its outward frailty - perched flamingo-like on stilts and canti-levering improbably over the hillside - my house had withstood all previous onslaughts. But that didn't stop me from stockpiling sandbags and fantasising about arks as each new sheet of water slapped against the redwood siding. Outside, the glen seemed to be melting, and I was shot through with melancholy and that special California sense of transience.
Lightning splintered the sky, and thunder applauded. Milo read while I fidgeted.
'This brugmansia is a nasty shit,' he said, peering at the pages. 'Any number of ways to hit someone with it - tea, soup, food, cigarettes.'
'Some preparations can be absorbed through the skin,' I said. 'There's a section later on about poultices.'
'Wonderful. And Auntie's an expert on it.' He frowned and slapped his hand on the table hard enough for the mug to dance. 'Paying a quack to blitz a kid's mind. Very cold. Do you think at some level he understood what was going on? All that talk about zombies?'
'God only knows.'
'Jesus, Alex, I hate family stuff. Pure shit, and the richer the family, the worse it smells. At least the poor folk do it honestly - get pissed at each other, grab the Remington off the rack, and blast away. These upper-crust assholes don't even have the guts to act out their own passions. Probably delegate their bowel movements. 'Grimes, take a shit, please. ' 'Yes, madam. ' ' He shook his head and took a long swallow of coffee.
'Besides lacking sublety,' I said, 'blasting away with the Remington gets you caught.'
He looked up.
'Yeah, I know. There's still no solid evidence. Rub it in.'
'They looked everywhere for the book?'
'No,' he growled. 'We used volunteers from the Braille Institute, let them tap around the deck for a coupla minutes with their little white canes, and called it a day. What do you think?'
'Excuse me, Sergeant.'
'Hmmph,' he mumbled, and returned to the book, humming off key: 'Rainy days and Mondays always bring me down.'
'It's Thursday.'
'Whatever.'
I went into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee. Sitting on the window ledge and drinking, I waited for a
lull in the downpour. When none came, I put on my raincoat anyway, stuck an old cowboy hat on my head,
