This made the two detectives move away from the door, and a flutter of satisfaction gave way in Simon’s stomach.
He’d been holding onto this memory, willing it to stop appearing in his mind, desperate to get out. The reason he’d come here was to help his wife and doing this would help, in the end. He told himself he was certain of it, and that he wasn’t offering up this revelation just to delay the inevitable of going back to her.
“When?” Bechdel asked, her eyes keen on him again.
“Almost ten years ago. It was in my food. She put arsenic into a soup she made for me—butternut squash, my favorite. But she didn’t get the ratio right, and I was only terribly sick for several days.”
The two detectives looked at Simon for a moment, and then silently came back to their chairs. Kirkpatrick’s squealed as he pulled it back across the linoleum floor. Simon waited a few more seconds for them to settle before he continued. They didn’t need to ask him to go on. He was ready.
“We never spoke of it.”
“Then how do you know it was an intentional poisoning, instead of just food poisoning or some other coincidental illness?” Bechdel’s skepticism flared again. She seemed intent on ignoring the facts about his wife.
“I’m a doctor. I know the symptoms of arsenic poisoning.”
“And you stayed with her?”
“Yes,” Simon said simply.
“Did you eat one of her meals again?” Kirkpatrick seemed almost amused by his question as he asked it, and Simon realized that he might not believe what Simon was saying.
“Yes, I did.” Simon thought about the next time Joyce made butternut squash soup. He came home from a long day of surgeries he’d scheduled purposefully to avoid making special plans for their wedding anniversary. When he walked in the door, the smell of the soup wafted from the kitchen and almost brought him to his knees. He was never meant to eat it.
It was a warning.
He turned around, headed to the nearest florist, and bought as many flowers as he could carry. And then he came home and apologized over and over. That was what Joyce wanted.
He didn’t make the same mistake again next year.
“Why? I don’t understand. Why are you still with her?”
“Do you know why she did it that day? It was because a man I was seeing had called the house—he’d found my number in the phone book—and then left a message on the answering machine that was a bit graphic. We’d been seeing each other for a few weeks, and I missed one of our meet-ups because of an emergency surgery. He thought I was blowing him off, and when I didn’t answer my cell phone he decided to call my house. He was upset and said some revealing things.”
“What did she say about it?” Kirkpatrick asked.
“She didn’t ask me about it. I found the message later, after I was recovered from the poisoning. You see, my wife is very, very smart. She didn’t get the proportions wrong. If she’d wanted me dead, I would be dead.”
“So it was a warning,” Bechdel surmised.
“Yes. For me to be more discreet.”
“Why are you telling us this now?”
“Because I wanted you to know what my wife is capable of, and how that might have given her enemies who would do awful things to pay back her cruelties.”
“You think your wife is being framed for murdering Dermot? And Trina?”
“I think my wife is capable of a lot of things, including killing. And I think Joyce is too smart to have left such a mess in her wake. Whoever is doing this is an amateur. My wife is a professional.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX LAURA
None of this was happening. None of this was real.
Laura wiped her hand across her face, and when she pulled it away it was streaked with red.
Blood, Addy’s blood, had sprayed across her face.
A few seconds ago Addy had sat across from Laura. Susan and Joyce brought Addy out from the trunk of the car after Susan insisted Laura go inside and wait in the trailer. Addy had looked pale and drawn when they sat her down, and she’d shivered with big jolting bursts for the first several minutes as she warmed herself off the meager heat.
And now Addy was bleeding out.
Someone gasped. Laura wasn’t sure who it was. Joyce or Susan. Maybe she did it herself. A moment later, someone else started laughing. The sound of it echoed in the trailer, where the air was almost solid, like you could take a chisel and break off a piece if you hammered hard enough. Laura forced herself to look up from the blood on her hand and examine the women around her. The laughter pitched higher, growing more hysterical, and Laura realized it was Susan.
Susan’s face contorted into a horrible grimace of pleasure and pain, like she was trying to convince herself to be happy she’d just shot someone who never did anything to hurt her.
And then the screaming started. Addy wasn’t dead yet.
Susan had shot her in the shoulder. Blood poured out of the wound.
Laura looked around for something to staunch the bleeding. She settled on a blanket thrown haphazardly over the back of the sofa.
Addy screamed again as Laura held the fabric against her shoulder. There was so much blood.
“This is insane,” Susan said between gulps of air to feed her laughter. The gun hung loosely at her side. Laura looked to Joyce for help, but Joyce wasn’t paying attention to Addy. Joyce was eyeing the gun.
The elegant woman remained calmer than everyone else. Joyce reached up with a hand, her wedding and engagement rings glinting off the ceiling light, and brushed a strand of sleek chestnut hair out of her eye. You’d never know, looking at Joyce, that a woman had just been shot in front of her, or that the gun had been wedged into her side only an hour before.
“Susan, put the gun down.” Joyce said it like a command, the way Laura’s schoolteachers would tell her to sit up straight in her chair or stop chewing the ends of her pencil.
Laura considered her options, even as part of her wanted to give up and curl into a ball on the couch and let the world spin out of control around her. So much death. So many terrible things.
And of course, Laura felt that small flutter in her stomach, and remembered she wasn’t just responsible for herself anymore. She had another life she was guiding into this world, and she couldn’t let anything or anyone hurt it. It was the last piece she still had of Dermot.
Susan ignored Joyce’s instructions. She began to pace the small aisle between the couch and the door of the trailer. Susan pulled her hands to her forehead, the gun dangling from a fingertip. “No, no, no,” she murmured to herself. “No, no, no.”
Joyce sat up even straighter in her square of the couch.
“Somebody help me,” Laura cried out, but both women ignored her. Addy mumbled something, but Laura couldn’t hear it.
The blanket was doing nothing to help stop the bleeding. Laura’s hands were warm with Addy’s blood, and a metallic scent clung to the air. A wave of disgust clambered up Laura’s throat, and she fought the urge to vomit. She needed to keep herself calm.
“You can’t take this back,” Joyce advised Susan. “You’ve done this. You killed her, just for the spite of it.”
Susan and Joyce were both acting like Addy was already dead.
Susan locked eyes with Joyce, terror written clearly across her face and her eyes wide with shock. Pale streaks ran down her cheeks where tears had washed away her heavy foundation.
“I didn’t think… I didn’t think I could do it.” Susan’s voice strained at the edges.
