Mercer’s Bend did not begin with a scream. It began with the rusted bell of the Great Southern Line’s switch engine tolling five o’clock, the same way it had every morning since before the war. The sound rolled through the tarpaper shacks and the clapboard houses and the one clean street where the company men lived, past the roundhouse and the creosote plant and the water tower with the faded letters that still read “Drink Coca-Cola,” settling finally into the kitchen of Harlan and Evelyn Voss, where Evelyn was already standing at the stove in a starched yellow dress, her hair pinned back so tightly it pulled the corners of her eyes into something that passed for serenity.
She was thirty-four years old and she had been married to the railroad for fifteen of them. Harlan was a conductor now, one of the lucky ones who had survived the cutbacks in ’49, and he wore his union pin like a second wedding band. He sat at the kitchen table, a big man with shoulders that filled his denim shirt, spooning sugar into his coffee without looking at her. Evelyn watched his hands. She always watched his hands. They were a conductor’s hands, capable and blunt, the knuckles scarred from coupling pins and ice-coated brake wheels. Once, those hands had traced the line of her jaw on a night in Mobile, when the air smelled like jasmine and she still believed the railroad was a temporary station on the way to somewhere beautiful. That was before Mercer’s Bend. Before the miscarriages. Before she learned that a conductor’s wife is merely a siding on a main line that never stops.
“Celia Drewe’s opening the boarding house today,” Harlan said, not looking up from his eggs. “The old McAvoy place down by the roundhouse.”
Evelyn’s hand paused over the percolator. “The widow.”
“That’s the one. Her husband got crushed in the Birmingham yard two winters back. She’s been living on his death benefit ever since. Decided to turn the house into a rooming house for the single crewmen.”
“How enterprising,” Evelyn said. Her voice was as smooth as the coffee she poured.
Harlan grunted. “She’ll do all right. Men need a clean bed and a hot meal. She’s got a laugh on her, too. The kind that makes you want to buy her a drink.”
Evelyn set the percolator down. The ceramic base met the countertop with a soft, precise click. Outside, the switch engine bell rang again, and the sound was like a hammer striking a coupling pin, and Evelyn felt something inside her chest shift one notch tighter.
She had seen Celia Drewe twice. The first time was at the company store, where Celia was buying flour and lamp oil and a bar of Castile soap. She had reddish hair that curled at the temples and a scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and when she laughed at something the clerk said, the sound bounced off the canned-goods shelves and landed somewhere deep in the hollow of Evelyn’s sternum. The second time was at church, the First Methodist of Mercer’s Bend, where Celia wore a black dress that was a half-inch too short for mourning and sang “Rock of Ages” with her eyes closed and her chin lifted, as if grief were a garment she was trying on for fit. Evelyn had watched the men in the pews shift in their seats. She had watched Harlan shift.
That was the thing about jealousy. It did not arrive with trumpets. It seeped in through the cracks, like the coal dust that settled on every surface in Mercer’s Bend no matter how many times you wiped. It coated your lungs and your tongue and the back of your throat until you could not taste anything but the bitter, metallic grit of it. And the worst part—the part nobody tells you—is that it asks for nothing. It does not want Harlan back. It does not want Celia’s life for itself. It wants only to see the thing that wounds you stop existing. It is the purest corrosion.
The day of the company picnic, Evelyn wore a blue gingham dress with a white collar and carried a lemon meringue pie that she had baked at four o’clock that morning while Harlan slept. The picnic was held on the scraggly patch of grass between the roundhouse and the water tower, with long tables made from sawbucks and plywood, and bunting strung from the telegraph poles. The railroad men stood in clusters, their shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, drinking beer from brown bottles and talking in the shorthand of tonnage ratings and schedule variances. Their wives formed a separate circle, orbiting a punch bowl that Evelyn had helped fill.
Celia Drewe arrived late, wearing a yellow sundress that was entirely too bright for a widow. She carried a tray of deviled eggs dusted with paprika, and she set them down on the table as if she were laying an offering at an altar. Harlan was the first to greet her. He put his hand on her elbow and leaned in to say something that made her laugh—that laugh, the one that bounced off the water tower and echoed across the whole damned yard. Evelyn was standing thirty feet away, pouring lemonade into paper cups, and she watched her husband’s thumb trace a small circle on Celia’s bare arm. It was not a passionate gesture. It was worse than that. It was easy. It was the kind of touch that comes from a man who has already imagined more.
Evelyn poured the lemonade. Her hands did not shake. Her smile did not falter. She handed a cup to the wife of the yardmaster, who was saying something about the humidity and the mosquitoes and whether the railroad would ever pave the access road. Evelyn nodded and murmured the appropriate sounds, but inside her skull a chemical reaction was taking place. Potassium ferricyanide and iron salts, she thought. Prussian blue. The color of the dress she would wear to Celia’s funeral. She had always been good at chemistry, had read her father’s old textbooks in the parlor while other girls practiced their needlepoint. But she had never had a reason to use it. Until now.
The knowledge of what the railroad kept stored in its maintenance shed was not a secret. It was just invisible, the way all important things are invisible to men who spend their days looking at coupling pins and air brakes. The Great Southern Line used a dozen different chemicals to keep its right-of-way clear, to treat its ties against rot, to poison the rats that nested in the grain cars. Arsenical weed killer came in fifty-five-gallon drums with yellow hazard placards. Creosote stained the earth so deeply that nothing grew within a hundred yards of the treatment plant. And in a locked cabinet in the signal department’s supply room, there were bottles of potassium arsenite, diluted for use as a rat poison, so lethally concentrated that a teaspoon could drop a mule.
Evelyn knew this because she listened. She listened when Harlan complained about the new safety inspector who wanted everything locked up. She listened when the section gang foreman mentioned the missing inventory that nobody bothered to report. She listened, and she filed every scrap of information away in the steel cabinet of her mind, and she waited.
After the picnic, after the pies were eaten and the beer bottles were collected and Celia Drewe walked home with the sunset catching the red in her hair, Harlan came to bed smelling of hops and sunshine. He fell asleep within minutes, his breathing deep and regular, his conductor’s hands lying open on the quilt. Evelyn lay beside him, rigid as a coupling pin, staring at the ceiling. The jealousy was a living thing now, coiled in her abdomen, and it whispered to her in a voice that sounded remarkably like her own. Not yet. Not tonight. But soon.
She rose before dawn. The switch engine bell had not yet rung. She dressed in a plain gray work dress and a pair of Harlan’s old boots, and she walked to the edge of the yard where the chemical stores were kept. The lock on the signal department shed was old and rusted, the kind of lock that a railroad issues in 1938 and never thinks about again. Evelyn had brought a pry bar from Harlan’s toolbox. The lock gave way with a sound like a bone snapping.
Inside, the shed smelled of machine oil and rodent droppings and the sharp, metallic tang of something that made her eyes water. She found the cabinet, unlocked it with a key she had stolen from the stationmaster’s desk six weeks ago, and removed a single glass bottle. The label read “Potassium Arsenite—DANGER—POISON.” She held it up to the thin light filtering through the grimy window. The liquid inside was clear and colorless, like water. Like mercy.
When she returned home, Harlan was still asleep. She hid the bottle inside an old hatbox on the top shelf of her closet, behind her wedding veil. Then she went to the kitchen and started the coffee. She set the table with the same care she had shown every morning for fifteen years. When Harlan came down, he kissed her on the cheek and said good morning, and Evelyn smiled up at him with the face of a woman who had never wanted for anything in her life.
That evening, she walked to Celia Drewe’s boarding house. She brought a jar of her mother’s preserved peaches and a recipe for nerve tonic, written out on a square of lavender notepaper. Celia answered the door in an apron, her cheeks flushed from the stove heat. She looked at Evelyn with something like gratitude, something like relief, the expression of a woman who has been lonely in a town that does not trust widows.
“I thought you might like some company,” Evelyn said. “I know what it is to be alone in a strange place.”
Celia’s laugh was softer now, almost shy. “You’re the first person who’s thought of me since I got here. The men, they look, but they don’t see. You understand.”
“Oh, I understand,” Evelyn said. “Better than you know.”
She stepped inside. The boarding house smelled of fresh paint and rising dough. Celia led her to the kitchen, where a kettle was whistling, and Evelyn surveyed the room with the careful eye of a cartographer mapping new territory. The teacups were on an open shelf. The sugar bowl was china, with a hairline crack. The windows overlooked the roundhouse, where the switch engine was shunting a line of boxcars under the fading light.
Before she left that night, she made Celia a cup of tea. The nerve tonic recipe, she said, was a family secret. Angelica root, chamomile, a touch of honey. Soothing. Celia drank it gratefully, her red curls falling across her forehead, and Evelyn watched the cup touch her lips with the patience of a woman who had already won.
The first dose was small. Barely a taste. Enough to bloom in the stomach like a seed. Evelyn took the empty cup, washed it herself, and set it back on the shelf. As she walked home through the cinders and the coal dust, the jealousy inside her was quiet for the first time in weeks. It was not gone. It was fed. And it was asking for more.
On the second Tuesday, she brought the tonic in a glass bottle, stoppered with a cork. The arsenic was so dilute that Celia would taste only the sweetness of the honey. By the time the symptoms began—the nausea, the cramping, the slow burning in the gut—she would blame the well water, or the railroad fumes, or the stress of widowhood. No one would suspect a perfect wife with a plate of ginger snaps and a prayer on her lips.
Evelyn stood before her bedroom mirror that night, after Harlan’s breathing had evened into sleep. She looked at her reflection and saw Celia’s face. The red hair. The freckles. The laugh lines. She reached out and touched the glass, and the glass was cold, and the face was hers. For now.
The bottle in the hatbox was still three-quarters full. Evelyn calculated the dosage with the precision of a pharmacist. At the current rate, Celia Drewe would be dead by the first frost. The railroad would blame contaminated groundwater, or a faulty boiler, or any of the hundred small poisons that the Great Southern Line had been leaking into Mercer’s Bend for forty years. And if anyone thought to ask questions, Evelyn would be there with her white gloves and her spotless kitchen and her husband’s union pin polished to a mirror shine.
The switch engine bell rang the hour. Somewhere down by the roundhouse, a steam whistle blew two short blasts, the signal for a clear track ahead. Evelyn turned away from the mirror and closed the closet door on the wedding veil and the bottle and the ghost of the woman she was about to erase.
But as she did, a thought struck her—a cold, slithering thing that made her breath catch. The company had hired a new claims adjuster. An ex-military man named Carmody. He had spent the last two weeks poking around the yard, asking questions about safety protocols and chemical inventories. He had interviewed Harlan twice. And this morning, at the post office, Evelyn had seen him studying a piece of paper with the Drewe boarding house address written on it in block capitals.
The jealousy in her stomach twisted, and for the first time, it was laced with something else. Fear. Not of capture. But of interruption. She was so close. The game was so perfectly designed. And she would not let some railroad bureaucrat with a cheap suit and a soldier’s conscience take it away from her.
She looked at the closet door one more time. Then she went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of buttermilk, and began to plan how a good wife might destroy a man like Jack Carmody without ever lifting a finger against him. The answer came to her before she reached the bottom of the glass. It was the same answer that had come to her in the chemical shed, in the church pew, in the moment she watched Celia’s lips close around the rim of a poisoned cup.
You use the railroad. You use the thing they love most. And you let it do the killing for you.
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