A Pinch of Poison

by Claudia Bishop

  “I’d better tell Myles they’re here,” said Meg.

  “Okay. Just wait for the right moment. Not in front of anyone else. I can’t stand to see him like that.”

  Meg reached out and hugged her. “Okay. Serve ‘em a meal and keep ‘em happy and oblivious.”

  “Just tell me what to serve.”

  “Cold soups and salads are in the fridge. Don’t try the crab clouds. You can heat the ratatouille in the microwave. Three minutes and stir, three minutes and stir again.”

  “Got it. Georgia can help me.”

  “Okay, I’ll send them all in.”

  Quill went to the refrigerator and began to set out the gazpacho and the vichyssoise, then put two portions of the ratatouille in the microwave. Meg had a large supply of sourdough bread stocked in a cupboard, and she removed a loaf and began to slice it into chunks.

  There was a whisper of movement across the flagstone patio outside.

  “Gawd,” said Georgia.

  The Fairbanks, Miss Kent, and Mr. Sakura filed in behind her. Marco DeMarco arrived with Georgia, the two of them looking reassuringly solid. “Not much more I can do down there,” DeMarco said in response to her inquiring glance. He shrugged. “And Meg said you were serving food. Sorry to bust in like this, but I was hungry. The poor guy.”

  Quill looked at Lila. The delicate face was flushed, the eyes a little wild. She drew the ribbons at her waist through her fingers, back and forth, back and forth. She never left her husband’s side. Lyle cupped her elbow protectively with one hand.

  “You all are getting quite an impression of Hemlock Falls,” said Georgia lightly, to break the uncomfortable silence.

  “We will not talk about it,” said Miss Kent firmly.

  “Sit anywhere, please,” said Quill. “I thought I’d get you a little early supper while we’re waiting for Mike and the van.”

  They settled into the chairs like large birds.

  “Did anyone figure out why poor Motoyama went berserk?” asked Georgia with determined cheerfulness.

  Quill shot her a grateful look. “Well!” she said, lightly. “It was typically Hemlock Falls, Gee. I hope it adds to your already fervent desire to come and live among us. It was the Jell-O exhibits.” Quill arranged the arugula on plates and removed the vinaigrette cruet from the shelf. “You’ll have noticed, I’m sure, the verve and personal attention which each of the ladies gave to their exhibits. Miriam, for example, is town librarian and a mystery fan, so she did a replica of the train in Murder on the Orient Express ...” The quality of the silence shifted, like a great weight.

  She stopped in midsentence.

  The bread knife fell from her fingers.

  Quill turned. Stared at them. They stared back. All of them, with the unwinking eyes of predators.

  Georgia’s hand jerked up. Lyle Fairbank’s eyes were steady. Miss Kent coughed a little and shifted in her seat.

  Georgia rose from her chair.

  Quill backed up and hit the counter. She could go no farther. The end of a terrible story she had read once, long ago, came to her, like jaws snapping shut in a trap. She thought.

  “No!” Tess cried. “It isn’t fair!” And then they came for her.

  “Georgia! You!” Quill pushed back a sudden spurt of tears. “He’s your brother,” she said, pointing suddenly at DeMarco. “The resemblance. It’s not the coloring. It’s the shape of the skull. The ears ...”

  “The painter’s eye,” said Georgia.

  “It’s you,” said Quill huskily. She cleared her throat. “It’s all of you.”

  The Kiplings watched her, with that alien stillness.

  “It couldn’t have happened any other way. You were all together when Louisa died. You were all at the party when Carlyle died. And yesterday...” She took a deep breath. “Yesterday you went into the woods. Together. And Hedrick followed you there.”

  “Yes,” said Georgia. Her face was patched with high, bright color.

  “Gee,” DeMarco ordered. “Shut up.”

  “No. I want to explain.” She stood, hands crossed over her chest, fists clenched, the pink caftan an incongruous flare of color. “And it’s my call. You know it’s my call. Can you stop me? Can you?”

  No one spoke.

  “Explain?” Quill, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her throat. “Explain three murders?”

  “There were more deaths than that,” said Georgia. “Far many more than that. We just stopped them, the Conways, from killing again.”

  “But why?!”

  Georgia’s face closed shut, like a fist. “I was Douglas Conway’s first wife. The one he divorced. To marry that rapacious little bitch Louisa North, with her slut of a daughter, and her murdering bastard of a son.” Her voice, shaking so badly that Quill could barely understand her, faltered and died away.

  “You lied to me!” cried Quill. “You said he died!”

  “And so he did, for me, seven years ago.”

  “I,” said Lyle Fairbanks, “was Doug Conway’s best friend. And my wife, Lila, was the woman the Conways tried to pin Doug’s murder on.”

  “I was Doug’s sister,” said Miss Kent. “And Louisa Conway stole the only man I ever loved.”

  “And you. Mr. Sakura.” Quills voice was just above a whisper.

  “Hedrick Conway and his women.” His black eyes glittered at her with a wise and angry intelligence. “A scandal, brought on by my ... association ... with the rapacious Miss Carlyle.”

  “All of them deserved to die,” said Georgia, a terrible satisfaction in her voice. “When they’d drained Doug, and finally killed him—because, Quill, it was murder, no matter what your lover tells you, what those investigators in Palm Beach tell you—they poisoned him. I contacted each one of my friends that that miserable little crew had injured, one by one. And we decided that at the right place, at the right time, they would help me. They would help me get justice.

  “I was fifty-two when Louisa North and her poisonous little slut of a daughter crossed Douglas’s path. We’d been married almost thirty years. I was Douglas’s first and only love. He was a genius, and his partner—my father, Stephen Hardwicke—knew how to parlay Douglas’s genius into the empire that they both built. We were rich. We were happy. Douglas had never even been with another woman. Not until that bitch and her brood showed up.”

  There were no tears, Quill noted. Just a bright, hard blaze behind Georgia’s eyes.

  “We came across them at one of those parties I’d told you about. We were traveling quite a lot, that year, trying things we hadn’t needed to try before. Douglas was dried up. Out of ideas. Spent. He loved his work and there was no more that he could do, so we traveled. We had everything material we could ever want. Except youth. Except change.

  “I told you about the circuit for the very rich. And that’s what we were, what I still am, the very rich. We accepted an invitation to a party on a yacht in Greece. For a week. I knew, once we got there, that I had to get him home. I knew, once I walked that deck and saw the human garbage tanning in the sun, that this was no place for us, no place at all. But I didn’t act on what I knew. And when I found them together—Louisa, Carlyle, and my Douglas, naked in a stateroom—my Douglas, with that thinning hair, those ridiculous glasses ...” Georgia closed her eyes.

  Miss Kent smoothed her linen skirt over her knees and took a sip of water.

  “I never should have divorced him. I know that now. Carlyle was into all kinds of drugs. She and her harpy mother battened on him, and then they sucked him dry.

  “He was generous in the divorce settlement. He could afford to be. What I told you was true. He died for me that day, seven years ago, he died for himself that day, seven years ago, although his physical death didn’t happen until a year later. At that party. In Palm Beach.”

  “Doug and Gee were talking about getting back together. It’s what precipitated his murder, you see,” said Lyle. “He was talking on the phone every day to Gee, here, trying to sha
ke the drugs those three had gotten him on to, and there would have been hell to pay for that little tribe, you can bet, if Gee’d come back into the picture. Those of us that loved Doug—and I’m not ashamed to say that I loved him, as nuts as he went for that year—well, were doing our best to get him and Gee back together.”

  Lila Fairbanks touched her husband’s hand. “We think what happened then is that Louisa, Hedrick, and Carlyle decided to kill him that weekend and arrived prepared. Botulism is easy enough to manufacture. You can do it in your own kitchen. When our own children were grown, and out of the house, I took up, oh, all kinds of things to feel as though I were still... womanly ... I guess is the word, and it may sound silly to someone like you, Quill, coming from me, who has so much in the way of material things, but I just wanted ... to be ordinary. So I brought Doug some of my canned jellies...”

  “She’d made a habit of it, the past year.” Lyle rubbed his wife’s shoulder. “It was kind of a joke around that group—well, not a joke exactly.”

  “Bored, brittle, sophisticated, and, as Georgia said, human garbage.” Miss Kent’s voice was crisp. “It was a joke, dear Lila, only to people who hadn’t had normal feelings for years, if ever. I, myself, always loved your jellies.”

  Quill didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “So they tried to make you responsible for the murder, Mrs. Fairbanks?”

  Lila nodded.

  “Set her back quite a bit,” said Lyle gruffly. “Ended up in the hospital for a while.”

  “It was a mental institution,” said Lila, trembling. “A house for crazy people.”

  “And as for the rest of us,” said DeMarco, “you don’t need a detailed drawing, do you? Louisa and Carlyle had a spat soon after they’d snared Doug, and Louisa turned her out without a penny. Mr. Sakura, here”—he coughed— “well, Carlyle tried a bit of blackmail on him.”

  “And it worked,” said Mr. Sakura. “My position, gone. The honor of my house was shamed.”

  “At least the bastards didn’t end up with much,” said Miss Kent cheerfully. “Sakura-san didn’t pay her a plugged nickel, and Gee’s managed to tie up the fortune in litigation for a long while.”

  “But Louisa and Cay?” said Quill.

  “Oh, yes,” said Miss Kent serenely. “Cay wormed her way back into the fold. My guess is that Cay tried a bit of blackmail on her own mother. Louisa’s appetites were notorious, and after she threw Cay out, let’s just say that Douglas, as besotted as he was, would have divorced her if he’d known what Cay did about her mother.”

  “And you, Miss Kent?” asked Quill. “Why did you hate him so?”

  “I would prefer, my dear, not to go into that. But I can tell you ...” She raised her finely boned face to Quill’s. Her lips drew back from her teeth. “I can tell you. I had a hell of a reason!”

  “Mr. Paulovich?” asked Quill.

  “Cover,” Georgia said, her grin white.

  “But the law. Couldn’t you have gone to the police?”

  “Don’t be naive!” Miss Kent snapped. “What possible recourse could we have had? Douglas was of age. He was mentally competent. In my own case—” She bit her lip. “There was no proof, you see. Absolutely no proof. There is no law to deal with the ruination of a man. Only laws for his physical demise. So we took, in the classic manner, matters into our own hands.”

  “You can’t,” said Quill. “You can’t.”

  “We can,” said Lyle, “and we did.”

  “But you’ve told me,” said Quill recklessly.

  “We have, Quill,” said Georgia a little sadly. “But no one will believe you, without proof, without another witness. These’s no jury in the country that would convict us on your word alone. And your sheriffs a good man, Quill, but we were very, very careful And we will back each other up. There’s too much at stake for us, you see.”

  She took a deep breath. “When you remember me, when you remember our friendship, you’ll see that I never lied to you. Never. Not once. I didn’t betray that trust, Quill, and as strange as this may seem to you now, it’s important that you know it.” She looked at the others, and without a word exchanged, they got to their feet. “Do you think Mike’s here with the van?”

  Quill spread her hands.

  “Then we’ll see ourselves out, my dear. Thank you.” Miss Kent patted her cheek. Her fingers were scented like violets.

  Quill watched them leave, heard their footsteps whisper-slide over the cobblestone court.

  She waited, as the darkness gathered in the little restaurant, and the sounds of a summer evening filled the quiet. She waited, and Myles came in exhausted, with lines around his mouth where there had been none before, and she said, as he walked in, a question in his eyes at finding her alone in the darkness:

  “The thing is, they forgot Mr. Stoker.”

  CHAPTER 15

  There were days in August which carried a melancholy hint of fall. Quill sat in the waiting room of the tiny hospital that served the Falls and the surrounding small communities and thought about the quality of the light: it was gold, round, autumnal. The warm air had lost the round fullness of humidity. An occasional current carried the coolness of September.

  Next to her, Meg was restless, fidgeting in the uncomfortable chair, picking at her shoelace. She relaxed. “There they are.”

  Quill turned and looked over her shoulder. Andy, remote in his hospital whites, came down the hall. His face was somber. Myles walked beside him.

  “Let’s go into my office.” Andy preceded them. It was small, the bookshelves crowded with medical texts, the desk overflowing with journals, magazines, and patient folders. There was a faint smell of antiseptic. Quill settled next to Myles. Meg stood at the window, looking out at the football field. The high school team had started practice. The shouted exuberance of the young was monitored by the coach’s whistle, a shrill imperative.

  “How long has she got?” asked Myles.

  Andy flipped through Georgia Hardwicke’s chart. “It’s hard to say. Six weeks. Maybe two months.”

  “So that’s why she signed a confession.” Quill rubbed her forehead. “She must have known about this. Last year. When she began to hunt the Conways.”

  Andy raised one eyebrow. “She says not.”

  Quill was brusque, fighting tears. “Of course she knew. Why else did she wait six years to take revenge? It’s pituitary cancer, you said? Metastasized to the liver? Of course she knew. I don’t think the rest of them did. If they had, if they knew that she planned to confess all along, do you think they would have helped her? She convinced them, I know she convinced them, that they’d be safe. That they’d be able to plan to kill and get away with it.” She looked at Myles. “Will the others go to trial?”

  “I doubt it. Lila Fairbanks might be ready to talk, but her lawyers have her sequestered. The others....” He shrugged. “Silence. The evidence rests on Georgia’s confession—which denies the complicity of the others—and on Stoker’s affidavit that they’d paid him to follow Hedrick Conway and his family and report back on their activities. We’ve got Stoker’s expense accounts, which show that he followed them everywhere for the past year, and copies of his reports on the Conways’ activities, but nothing to support a charge of murder, or even conspiracy to murder. Everything can be explained by the civil action the Kiplings have brought against Douglas Conway’s estate. Sakura’s attempting to recover the income he lost from Carlyle Con-way’s blackmail scheme. Georgia’s suing to have the will contested because of Louisa’s and Carlyle’s undue influence. Her brother, who’s heir to Georgia’s fortune, has a legitimate interest in her fiscal status. The Fairbanks claim they were conducting a private investigation to pin Douglas Conway’s murder on the Conways so that Lila’s name could be cleared. Everyone except Miss Kent had logical— not fair—but logical reasons for having Conway followed by Axminster Stoker. Nothing actionable there. And, as I said, impossible to prove conspiracy.”

  “Do you suppose we’
ll ever know about Miss Kent?” asked Meg.

  Myles shrugged.

  “It’s the ruthlessness of it,” said Meg. “Poor Stoke. The poor man had no idea he was being used as a stalking horse for murder.”

  “I was blind to it,” said Quill, rousing herself from a fixed concentration on a replica of a human skull on Andy’s desk. “They all referred to him as ‘Stoke.’ The family resemblance between Georgia and DeMarco. The connections between HC Pharmaceuticals and the Conways. The fact that all of them were nearby when each of the murders occurred. The lies they told! The lies!”

  “The rich,” said Andy,” are different from you and me. Quill? Georgia would like to see you.”

  “Now, Andy?” asked Quill.”I’m going to transfer her to the prison hospital at Attica this afternoon. She’s in three-eleven.” The halls had the hushed silence peculiar to hospitals, blanketing the constancy of its purpose, distancing visitors from the world of life from the reality of death. Georgia was pale, her face drawn, but the smile was there, and the booming, generous laugh. One of the nurses turned away from her bedside with a grin and a shake of her head as Quill pushed open the door and entered the room.

  “Could you excuse us for a second?” asked Quill. The nurse left on noiseless feet. Georgia’s smile died. “Well, Miss Sarah. This has shaken you up, hasn’t it?”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “An inadequate understatement. Not my style at all.” She nodded to the visitor’s chair. “Sit down.” Quill sat carefully and clasped her hands in her lap.

  “You feel betrayed.”

  “I do.”

  “And what else? Disgusted? Revolted? Furious?”

  “All those.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t expect you to forgive me. But I want to tell you something. Gawd. I hope I get this right.” She reached to the table beside the bed and drank from the tumbler of water. “Yes, I used some people who trusted me. I traded on love, affection, loyalty, friendship. With you. And Stoke. I used poor old Stoke, who thought that he was cooperating in an effort to embarrass Hedrick and those harpy women. Stoke wanted to right a wrong that’d been done to a man he’d revered for twenty years. But that doesn’t mean I’m a liar. It means that I made a choice. I know exactly what I’ve sacrificed, Quill. I know what’s been taken from me, as a person, because I did what I did. But I knew what I was doing. The Conways would, did get away with it. This”—she swept her hand down, across her chest and belly—”this cancer condemned me, and freed me all at once. I was sentenced before my crimes were committed. And once I decided to kill them—and I killed all three of them, Quill— I had no choice but to use the people I loved. Didn’t someone once call them little murders, the crimes we commit against the healthy living?”