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

different too. But she wasn’t. She was perfectly rigid, and terribly, oh terribly like her father.
    “He had foam all over his mouth. I took him to the vet.— before breakfast. He said it was poison. I know she did it.”
    “That’s ridiculous, Lowell,” I said.
    “It isn’t. I… I saw her do it. I should have known, but I didn’t think she was as bad as that, not really. I knew she couldn’t bear him, and she’s never been even decent to him. Last night after dinner I was just coming in the room when I saw her lean down and pet him and give him a piece of candy. The vet says that’s the way he was poisoned.”
    I said nothing. I didn’t know anything to say. I’d never seen Lowell Nash like this. She hadn’t moved since she’d come into the room. All the Christmas trappings, the vine cedar and mistletoe, the crazy presents we’d been laughing at, and the bright litter of hastily torn-off wrappings that Lilac hadn’t cleaned up yet, seemed frivolous suddenly and a little unreal.
    “I wanted to tell you, because I’m going to get even with her someday. And I don’t want you to think I’m just mean and vindictive. She’s been asking for it a long time.”
    My hand was still closed tightly on the mantel, I was still staring stupidly at the wet spot on the floor, long after I heard the garden door slam shut. Lilac’s black face and saucer-wide eyes peering at me from the dining room brought me to my senses.
    “Law, Mis’ Grace, what all’s the mattuh with that chil’, come bussin’ in lak that, lookin’ lak death on a pale horse?”
    “Her dog died last night,” I said.
    “ ’Deed an’ it’s time,” Lilac observed practically. She padded back downstairs to the kitchen to tell Julius, who’s her husband. At least I think he is. We have burned biscuits and the furnace fire goes out when they’re having one of their divorces, and the house was quite warm when I got home from Nassau.
    If the telephone hadn’t rung just then, things might have turned out very differently. I might have gone to Iris’s that afternoon. I might have seen Colonel Primrose that evening and told him about the poisoned dog. More important, probably, I should have seen Randall Nash when he came to my house on the late afternoon of the 29th. As it was, I saw none of them, and whatever might have happened didn’t happen. Which is foolish, of course, for in my heart I’m sure I believe that what is to happen pretty much does happen. The telephone ringing when it did was as much a part of the Destiny that had us all by the scruff of the neck as the poison that put Senator McGilvray’s feathered liver-and-white fourth foot in the grave.
    Anyway, the phone did ring. It was Mary Lucas on long distance from somewhere this side of Los Angeles, and would I for mercy’s sake go with my kids that afternoon to Virginia and pinch hit as chaperone at young Mary’s house party, because her plane had been held up and she’d be late, and little Mary would be so disappointed, and anyway it was too late to call it off now because most of the youngsters were coming from New York and New England and would be yammering at the door with nobody to chaperone them. It wasn’t her fault California’s weather had gone mad, she really had expected to be home in time.
    And she did arrive, but not till the afternoon of the 29th— and I got home not half an hour after Randall Nash had come and waited twenty minutes, pacing up and down the living room, so Lilac said, and then finally had gone. The empty glass and half-empty decanter were still on the table.
    “That theah was full to the top when Ah took it in, Mis’ Grace,” Lilac said.
    I wasn’t surprised, therefore, when Iris called up and said Randall had decided not to go to the Assembly that night, but that Colonel Primrose and Stephen Donaldson were taking the two of us, and we’d meet Lowell and Mac there at Linthicum Hall. The three of them would come, if I didn’t mind, to my