The Death of a Much Travelled Woman by Barbara Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

continued down the hall and disappeared. I scrambled out again. But my eye had been caught by a crumpled piece of paper in between the bed and the night stand. It looked as if it had been thrown there in a fit of anger. I smoothed it out and read:
POISON PEN
    Some authors are sensitive about their secrets. I found that out the hard way during the most recent international feminist book fair in Vladivostok when Simone Jefferson tried to poison me with a quantity of strychnine placed on the tip of my pen. Like many people, Simone had noticed that I’m in the habit of sucking my pen when I’m thinking. So she substituted one that had poison in order to shut me up. The only reason I’m here today is that there was only enough of the substance to make me really ill, not enough to kill me. Otherwise I would have been murdered in cold blood in the very midst of the book fair, while selling this journal.
    Lulu went on to detail the means by which Simone was caught. The bottle of rat poison in her hotel room. Her fingerprints on the pen. “All because,” Lulu wrote, “Simone was afraid I was going to finally expose the secret she’d hidden for so long. Her lesbianism.”
    Again I heard footsteps in the corridor, but this time I wasn’t fast enough. I was on my hands and knees by the bed when Lulu came in. She immediately spotted the paper in my hand.
    “I didn’t mean to kill Olga,” she said, edging toward me while she kept the door well blocked. “Nobody can accuse me of premeditated murder. That editorial is proof. The poison was meant for me. That’s not a crime, is it?”
    “No,” I said. “Not if you really meant to commit suicide. But you miscalculated the dose; you only thought you’d get ill and that Simone would be blamed. It was a big risk to take, Lulu. And Olga took the consequences.”
    I couldn’t see any way around her body to the door.
    “No one’s going to know,” she said, coming closer to me. “I’ve still got some strychnine here and, as we both know, it doesn’t take much.”
    “I’ve always thought,” I said calmly, “that all those scarves were a big fashion mistake.” I grabbed the ends of one of them and started twisting.
    The door behind her burst open.
    “KGB!” said Felicity Horsey-Smythe playfully, and then gasped. “Oh my, Cassandra dear, whatever are you doing to poor Lulu? She looks as if she can’t breathe very well like that.”
    “Be a good girl, Felicity,” I said, still keeping a firm grip on Lulu, “and call the police, dear.”
    A half hour later Simone had retrieved the bottle of rat poison Lulu had planted in her room, and we’d presented it together with Lulu’s editorial to the Soviet police. I had no idea what would happen to Lulu now; whether she’d be tried and punished, sent to Siberia, or locked up in the Lubyanka. Whatever her punishment, I suspected it would be milder than what some of Lulu’s victims would have meted out if they’d had the chance.
    Still, I suppose some good did come out of it all. Felicity Horsey-Smythe had a wonderful subject for her next novel, and Darcy Joanne said she’d publish it in the States. They signed a contract at the Vladivostok Airport and agreed to move quickly on the project. They did want, after all, to get the book out in time for the next international feminist book fair.
    “Tierra del Fuego!” said Dee when I told her. “I can hardly wait.”

Theft of the Poet
    I T STARTED GRADUALLY. HERE and there on London streets new blue plaques that might have been placed there by the authorities, if the authorities had been reasonably literate and unreasonably feminist, began to appear. At 22 Hyde Park Gate, the enamel plaque stating that Leslie Stephen, the noted biographer, had lived here was joined by a new metal plate, much the same size and much the same color, which informed the passerby that this was where writer Virginia Woolf and painter Vanessa Bell had spent their childhoods. Over in Primrose Hill, the