hope the color of her hair was her only contribution. Wasn’t she the one so notorious for poisoning...?” I stopped midsentence, a sudden, awful image of Mary Linton popping into my mind. She too had pale yellow hair, so in contrast to my dark-haired plainness.
Our eyes met across the table. It was no good pretending. I put my fork down and drank a little of my wine.
“You’d better tell me,” I said.
“I spent an hour or so this afternoon fielding some rather peculiar questions,” he said, looking down at his plate and twirling a fork idly in the tagliatelle. “Tell me something, just what was this friend of yours trying to cure with this little brew?”
I was too impatient to play games. “What was in it, Jerry?”
“Oh, a little tea, a little lemon, a little arsenic....”
I caught my breath sharply and said, too loudly, “Arsenic?”
He motioned me to lower my voice and glanced around, but no one seemed to have noticed my startled exclamation.
“Was there...very much arsenic?” It sounded, even as I asked it, a particularly foolish question. What did it matter just exactly how much arsenic there was in a cup of tea, when there oughtn’t to be any there at all?
“Do you want it in scientific terms?”
“No, no, just...how dangerous would it be?”
He was silent for a moment, still toying with his pasta. The scent of food drifted upward from my neglected dinner. A few minutes before it had been a delicious aroma. Now it sickened me.
“Any arsenic is dangerous,” he said finally. “There wasn’t enough in that tea to kill anybody....”
I breathed a sigh of relief—prematurely as it turned out.
“Not with just that one dose, at least.”
It took a minute for the implication to become clear. “Can arsenic be given over a period of time?” I asked hesitantly. “I mean, if it were given that way, would it eventually prove fatal, even though the individual doses were small?”
“Is it cumulative, you mean? Yes. This dosage is quite small, as a matter of fact. A strong, healthy person wouldn’t really suffer much ill effect from it. A bit of queasiness, some fatigue. He’d probably think of himself as a bit ‘out of it,’ and go about his business as usual.”
“But if he took repeated doses?”
“If he took several like this over a period of say a few weeks, he would gradually become sick. So long as he kept taking this tea, assuming it had the same surprising ingredient in it, he would just keep getting sicker and sicker without knowing why. It’s the kind of symptom that is vague enough, he might not even get around to seeing a doctor, particularly with all the mysterious viruses and touches of something going around today.”
“What symptoms would he have, exactly?” I was seeing Jeff’s pale, drawn face, thinner than it ought to have been.
“Headaches, nausea, maybe vomiting as it went along, some muscular cramps, a general debilitation—all getting progressively worse.”
“Until...?”
“Until he died.” He paused. “Of course, I’m not expert on poisons. I could refer you to a toxicologist, if you like.”
I shook my head. “No, that won’t be necessary.” It didn’t matter greatly if some of the fine points of what he told me were inaccurate. The important thing was that the poison was there, in the tea, and that it could make someone sick, and eventually kill them.
“Chris, look.” He reached across the table to take my hand. “Is there something you want to talk about? Are you in any kind of spot? Because if someone really gave you this stuff as a remedy, something is rotten in Denmark.”
In Denmark? I was thinking, in Elsinore. And hadn’t that been the name of Hamlet’s castle? Yes, something was very rotten in Denmark.
Aloud, I said, “No, it isn’t anything, really. I know it all sounds very mysterious and dramatic, but it’s only one of those mistakes that occur.”
I gave him a forced smile. He did not believe me, of course.
“Okay.” He let go of my hand. “Only remember, I’m close by if you need me.”
But you won’t be close by, I thought later, staring across my living room at a cheap brown and blue copy of the Picasso woman, you’ll be here and I will be in Elsinore. If I go.
And there was the rub. Need I go at all?
It might, after all, be nothing more than some bizarre mistake. What did people use arsenic for, anyway? Rat poison? Or some sort of cleaning job? Might it not have gotten accidentally onto the tea leaves, soaked in, so that a truly innocent and devoted act on the part of Mary Linton was causing her husband to be poisoned?
Then I had only to write to Jeff and tell him what I had learned. He could discover for himself if the tea leaves were accidentally soaked with arsenic (was arsenic liquid, I wondered. And if powder, wouldn’t it be noticed on the leaves when the tea was brewed. )
Of even if his fears were true, if Mary was trying to murder him, then my letter would confirm the fact. He had only to leave.
Except, he had looked really awful that day—was it only two days ago? And how did a man as sick as he obviously was justify wanting to go out for a stroll in winter snow.
I went impatiently into the kitchen to pour myself a cup of coffee. Usually at this time of evening I drank tea, but I had tried that earlier and found it unpalatable.
All right, look at in the worst possible light, I told myself. Suppose Mary Linton was trying to murder Jeff. Suppose he were already sick enough that he could do nothing about it, couldn’t escape, had no one to whom he could turn for help (he had said that, hadn’t he?)
So what did that have to do with me? I wasn’t in love with him. He wasn’t, I was quite sure, in love with me. We had not seen one another for five years and at that time, when I had been in love, he had jilted me. Coldly, cruelly, not caring at all if I nearly died from heartache. I owed him nothing.
Which of course was utter nonsense. Nearly dying from heartache was a far cry from literally dying from arsenic poisoning.
And I did owe him, in the same sense that Jerry owed me some concern and his friend owed Jerry some concern, and so on and on through the whole structure that man had built up for himself and called civilization.
Because we are, in some measure at least, our brother’s keepers. Because there are the dues we have to pay as part of the entire scheme, part of the human race. Because it is necessary to balance the ledger sheet against all the acts of concern and kindness that other people had done to me and would do again.
I went into my tiny bedroom, to my closet. The little overnight case was on the shelf. I took it down, carrying it to the bed. It had a film of dust on it and I got a cloth from the kitchen and dusted it carefully. Then I opened it and began to put things into it.
There
