2. The Alchemy of Spite

The rains came to Mercer’s Bend on the first Tuesday in October, a cold, needling drizzle that turned the cinders to black mud and set the telegraph wires humming with static. Evelyn Voss walked to the boarding house with the nerve tonic wrapped in brown paper, the bottle warm against her chest inside her raincoat. She had increased the dosage again—not enough to kill, but enough to push Celia Drewe past the point where any doctor could mistake her symptoms for nerves. The arsenic worked best in the cold, she had read. It mimicked winter ailments, the kind that carried off old people and sickly children and widows who had been weakened by grief. By the time the first frost came, Celia would be too far gone to save.

But something was different this Tuesday. When Evelyn rounded the corner by the water tower, she saw a black sedan parked in front of the boarding house, its tires sinking into the mud, its windows fogged from the inside. It was not a company car—the railroad used green Plymouths with the Great Southern logo stenciled on the doors. This sedan was older, a prewar Ford with a dented rear fender and a license plate that read Meridianville. Evelyn slowed her pace, and the jealousy in her stomach uncoiled, testing the air.

The man who opened the boarding house door was not Jack Carmody. He was older, heavier, with a face that looked like a fist wrapped around a cigar. He wore a rumpled suit and a hat that had seen better days, and he had the weary, bureaucratic posture of someone who spent his life delivering bad news to people who did not want to hear it. Evelyn recognized him from the company picnic: Mr. Aldous Pettigrew, the part-time coroner for Wesson County, who made his living as an undertaker and filled in for the state medical examiner when the state medical examiner was too busy to drive forty miles on muddy roads.

Pettigrew tipped his hat. “Mrs. Voss, isn’t it? Conductor Voss’s wife?”

“Yes. Is something wrong with Celia?”

Pettigrew’s face did not change expression, but his eyes flickered toward the house. “Mrs. Drewe has filed a complaint with the county health office. She believes the water in her well has been contaminated by the railroad’s chemical storage. I’m here to take samples.”

Evelyn felt a cold spike of surprise. Celia had filed a complaint. Celia, who had been so grateful for the nerve tonic, so trusting of Evelyn’s friendship, had gone behind her back and spoken to the authorities. That was unexpected. That was trouble.

“How strange,” Evelyn said. “She hasn’t mentioned anything to me. May I see her?”

“She’s resting. The doctor gave her a sedative. I wouldn’t disturb her just now.”

Evelyn nodded and continued down the street, her mind racing. If Celia was suspicious enough to file a complaint, she was suspicious enough to start asking questions about the tonic. And if she started asking questions about the tonic, someone might start asking questions about the woman who prepared it.

She needed to accelerate the plan. But first, she needed to find out what Celia had told the coroner.

That afternoon, Evelyn did something she had not done in fifteen years of marriage. She went to the yard office and asked to see her husband.

Harlan was in the conductor’s room, filling out his train report, his denim jacket hung over the back of his chair and his coupling pin lying on the desk beside his lunch pail. He looked up when she entered, and his face registered surprise and then something else—something that might have been guilt, or might have been the guarded expression of a man who did not like his wife appearing unannounced at his workplace.

“Evie? Everything all right?”

“I was worried about Celia Drewe,” Evelyn said, sitting down on the wooden bench by the window. “Mr. Pettigrew was at her house this morning. He said she filed a complaint about the water.”

Harlan’s face darkened. “She did. The union’s been talking about it all morning. The company’s in an uproar. If the county finds contamination, there could be a lawsuit. The Great Southern’s liability department has already called in their lawyers from Birmingham.”

“Could the water really be making her sick?”

“I don’t know. Carmody’s been testing samples for weeks. He hasn’t found anything conclusive. But the Drewe woman’s been getting worse, and people are starting to notice. The boarders are talking about leaving. Tully says she can barely keep down water anymore.”

Evelyn absorbed this information. The boarders were talking. Tully was talking. The union was talking. The whole town was watching Celia Drewe die by inches, and every pair of eyes was a witness. She would need to be more careful than she had ever been.

“Poor Celia,” she said. “I’ve been bringing her my mother’s nerve tonic, but it doesn’t seem to be helping.”

Harlan looked at her sharply. “Nerve tonic?”

“Angelica root and chamomile. I told you. I’ve been visiting her on Tuesdays.”

“You never said anything about a tonic.”

“Didn’t I? I must have forgotten. It’s such a small thing.”

Harlan stared at her for a long moment. The train report lay forgotten on his desk. The switch engine bell rang five o’clock, and somewhere in the roundhouse a steam whistle blew, but Harlan did not move. He was looking at his wife the way a conductor looks at a coupling pin that might be about to shear.

“Evie,” he said slowly, “you haven’t been giving her anything else, have you? Any kind of medicine? Anything from the drugstore?”

“Of course not. Why would you ask that?”

“Because Carmody was here this morning. He said the symptoms Mrs. Drewe is showing don’t match any gastric fever he’s ever seen. He said they look more like heavy metal poisoning. Arsenic, maybe. Or lead.”

Evelyn’s heart stopped for one beat, two beats, three. Then it resumed its steady rhythm, and she arranged her face into an expression of mild confusion. “Arsenic? That’s absurd. Where would anyone get arsenic in Mercer’s Bend?”

“The weed killer. The rat poison. The signal shed was broken into a few months back. Carmody found a broken lock, but nobody reported any missing inventory. He’s been digging ever since.”

“Goodness,” Evelyn said. “You don’t think someone is poisoning her deliberately?”

Harlan shook his head. “Carmody thinks it’s the groundwater. But he’s also not ruling anything out. He’s a thorough man.” He paused, and his voice dropped. “Evie, if you know anything about this, you need to tell me now. Before this gets any bigger.”

Evelyn met his eyes. “I don’t know anything, Harlan. I’m just trying to be a good friend to a lonely widow.”

Harlan held her gaze for a long time. Then he looked away, picked up his coupling pin, and turned it over in his hands. “All right. But stay away from the boarding house for a while. Let Carmody do his job. I don’t want you mixed up in this.”

“Of course,” Evelyn said. “Whatever you think is best.”

She left the yard office and walked home through the cold drizzle. The jealousy was no longer coiled in her stomach. It was burning through her veins, hot and urgent and demanding action. Carmody knew about arsenic. Carmody had traced the broken lock to the signal shed. Carmody was building a case, and he was building it around the missing chemicals, and if he kept digging, he would eventually find his way to the hatbox in her closet and the empty bottle under the pantry floor.

She needed to give him a suspect. And she knew exactly who it would be.

Dr. Lemuel Frye’s office was empty when Evelyn arrived the next Thursday. The receptionist with the goiter had gone home early with a headache, and the door to the dispensary was, as always, unlocked. Evelyn slipped inside and closed the door behind her. The rows of brown bottles glinted in the dim light, their labels facing outward like soldiers on parade. Phenobarbital. Codeine phosphate. Tincture of belladonna. Potassium arsenite, the two-percent solution, sitting on the third shelf exactly where she had seen it on her first visit.

She removed the bottle from her handbag—the bottle she had stolen from the signal shed, now cleaned and dried and wrapped in a handkerchief. She placed it on the shelf beside Frye’s own bottle of potassium arsenite. Then she took Frye’s dispensing bottle of phenobarbital, unscrewed the cap, and carefully poured a small amount of the liquid into a glass vial that she had brought from home. The phenobarbital would be her insurance. If anyone tested the tonic bottle that Celia kept by her bedside, they would find traces of a sedative that Frye had prescribed. And Frye would not be able to explain how his phenobarbital had ended up in a widow’s nerve tonic.

She was about to leave when she heard footsteps on the stairs. Heavy footsteps. The footsteps of a man who was not Dr. Frye.

Evelyn stepped back into the shadows of the dispensary and pulled the door nearly shut, leaving a crack wide enough to see through. Through the crack, she watched Jack Carmody walk into the examination room.

He was alone. He stood in the center of the room for a long moment, his hands in his pockets, his eyes moving slowly across the furniture. Then he walked to the desk and began opening drawers. He did it methodically, without haste, the way a man opens drawers when he has every right to be there. He removed a file folder, flipped through it, replaced it. He examined Frye’s prescription pad. He checked the lock on the filing cabinet. Then he walked toward the dispensary.

Evelyn held her breath. Her hand closed around the glass vial in her pocket. If Carmody opened the door, she would have to explain why she was standing in a locked dispensary holding a vial of stolen sedatives. There was no lie that could explain that. There was only the truth, and the truth would destroy everything.

Carmody’s hand touched the doorknob. He turned it. The door swung open two inches, and then he paused. From the street outside, a steam whistle blew—two short blasts, the signal for an approaching freight. Carmody turned his head toward the window. Then he let go of the doorknob, walked back across the examination room, and descended the stairs.

Evelyn waited until the footsteps faded. Then she let out a breath that burned her lungs. She slipped out of the dispensary, down the stairs, and into the cold October afternoon. The vial of phenobarbital was still in her pocket. The stolen bottle of potassium arsenite was still on Frye’s shelf, waiting to be discovered. But Carmody had been inches away from catching her. Inches. And if he was searching Frye’s office without permission, it meant he was no longer looking at the groundwater. He was looking at a suspect.

That night, Celia Drewe took a turn for the worse. The fireman Tully found her in the kitchen, slumped over the table, her teacup shattered on the floor. The ambulance took her to the yard clinic, and Dr. Frye worked over her for three hours, pumping her stomach and administering fluids and shaking his head at the nurses. By midnight, she was stable but unconscious, her skin the color of old newsprint, her breathing shallow and irregular.

Evelyn heard the news from Harlan, who heard it from Tully, who had been at the clinic all night. She listened with the appropriate expression of concern, and when Harlan had finished, she went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. Her hands were steady. Her mind was clear.

Celia was alive, but barely. The arsenic had done its work, and the phenobarbital had accelerated the decline. If Celia died, the coroner would find the arsenic in her tissues, and Carmody would trace it back to the railroad’s chemical stores, and the trail would lead to Dr. Frye’s unlocked dispensary and the stolen bottle on the shelf. It was a perfect frame. All she had to do was wait.

But waiting was its own kind of poison. And the jealousy was still hungry.

The next morning, Evelyn walked to the post office and mailed a second letter to Jack Carmody. This one was typewritten on plain paper, with no signature. It read: “Dr. Frye visits the Drewe boarding house every Tuesday. He brings medicine. Ask his receptionist about the inventory that doesn’t match.”

She dropped the letter in the slot and walked home. The drizzle had stopped. The sun was breaking through the clouds, pale and watery, the color of weak tea. In the clinic by the roundhouse, Celia Drewe was fighting for her life. In the office above the hardware store, Dr. Frye was going about his morning rounds, unaware that the trap was already closing around him. And in the conductor’s house on the clean street, Evelyn Voss stood at the kitchen window and watched a black sedan pull up to the curb.

It was Carmody. He got out of the car and walked up the front path. His face was unreadable, but his posture was the posture of a man who had come to ask hard questions. He knocked on the door, and Evelyn smoothed her dress, composed her face, and went to answer.

But this time, she was not afraid. Because she had just mailed the letter that would seal Frye’s fate. Because the evidence in the dispensary pointed squarely at the doctor. Because the only person who could contradict her story was lying unconscious in a clinic bed, her kidneys failing, her voice silenced by the poison that was still working its way through her veins.

She opened the door.

“Mrs. Voss,” Carmody said. “We need to talk about Dr. Frye.”

“Of course, Mr. Carmody,” Evelyn said, and her voice was as smooth as the surface of a cup of poisoned tea. “Please come in. I’ve been expecting you.”