Nothing made him happy.
Except considering what he could do to Joyce. For Joyce, he corrected himself. Because, of course, she was his wife and he was working to make up for the pain he’d caused her.
“I can tell you things,” Simon offered as a last resort.
Bechdel gave him a raised eyebrow and motioned with her hand through the door. “Nothing we don’t already know.”
Simon bristled at this. As beaten down as he was, he still didn’t tolerate being told he wasn’t the smartest person in the room. That was a lesson Joyce learned early on in their life together.
“My wife hated Trina Dell.” He said it like an oath, the words sturdy on his tongue.
“Everyone knows that.” Kirkpatrick stood at the door with Bechdel, but Simon remained seated. He knew he was irritating them, not following the silent rules of body language to leave their space.
“My wife was sleeping with Dermot.”
“As we confirmed from your messages.” Kirkpatrick checked his watch. It was an old-fashioned movement that made Simon feel nostalgic in a way. So many young people just looked at their phones instead. “We’re examining all possibilities.”
“Joyce tried to kill me,” he said.
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.
