The Simple Way of Poison by Leslie Ford Read Free Book Online Page A

before I could move—or at least before I did move—a door opened on the second floor landing. Randall Nash came out. I could see his long dark dressing gown and his gleaming white shirt front and black tie. He came slowly to the edge of the landing and stood, his hands on the dark mahogany rail, listening.
    I saw the front door open, and Iris was alone in the lower hall. She stood there a long time, it seemed to me, both hands at her sides. Then she turned and came slowly up the stairs, almost as if she were too weary even to reach the first landing, much less the second, where her husband was waiting. I looked up at him. The place where he had been was empty, the door behind him closed again.
    “That’s too bad,” I thought. And then I wondered quite suddenly; and it seemed immediately very strange to me that I hadn’t wondered before. Was he getting anonymous letters too… and did that explain why he had changed so much in so short a time? And was he driving her back to the very hell he’d saved her from?

4
    I didn’t see Iris Nash the next day. I thought about her several times, a little curious and vaguely disturbed. I did, however, see Lowell. It was after eleven. We had just finished breakfast—stacks of golden brown cakes and sweet fresh country sausage—and the boys had gone upstairs to dress. I could hear the bath water running and their shouts back and forth. I was looking through a stack of telegraph greetings that had just come, and thinking that the company who invented a device that allows you to send greetings Christmas morning to all the people you’ve forgotten, and still appear specially thoughtful, really deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. I looked up to see Lowell standing in the door.
    Her face was white, her stockings were torn where she’d evidently climbed over the broken wall, her feet in suede pumps were covered with snow that was melting and forming in a puddle on the floor.
    “Lowell!” I said. “What’s the matter?”
    She brushed her hair back from her forehead and peeled off the little grey fur cap she wore. Her eyes were wide and burning, her red lips set in a thin tight line.
    “She’s done it,” she said, in a dead brittle voice. “I knew she would.”
    I put down the telegrams. My hands were shaking too noticeably to hold them.
    “Done what, Lowell?” I demanded sharply.
    “She’s poisoned him.”
    I steadied myself against the cedar-covered mantel. My heart was in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t for one terrible instant trust myself to speak. My voice when it did come sounded completely detached and half a million miles away.
    “Poisoned who, Lowell?”
    “Senator McGilvray. When I found him this morning he’d been dead for hours.”
    It took me a long time; even then, to remember that it was a fourteen year old liver-and-white cocker spaniel with three feet in the grave and the other tottering on the brink that she was talking about, not a human being. My mind struggled back over a long thorny road that I hadn’t realized it had journeyed. I stared at her standing there, her grey fur cap in her hand, her face white above the high fur collar of her grey wool suit streaked with red brick dust, with a three-cornered tear over one knee. I tried hard to keep then from a crazy burst of laughter.
    “She’s always hated him, just as she hates me—because he was mine, and because he didn’t like her.”
    She spoke in the same dry hard voice, her lips scarcely moving to form the words.
    “Why do you think he was poisoned, Lowell,” I asked. “He was very old. He may have died of old age.”
    I must have sounded cold and unsympathetic, of course. If it had been my dog I know how I should have felt, no matter how old and infirm he was. On the other hand, I distinctly remembered seeing Senator McGilvray the day before wheezing peacefully away at Iris’s feet under the folds of her green brocaded house coat.—Or if she’d been crying—then it would have been