A dram of poison

by Charlotte aut Armstrong; Internet Archive

"At a quarter of six."

  "Oh. Well, will you be sure to have him call this number?"

  Ethel took down the number.

  "It's important," said the voice, fading again as if in some mysterious agitation.

  "I'll tell him," said Ethel, soothingly.

  Ethel hung up. She was slightly annoyed.

  Inconsiderate! Consideration was the first rule in such a menage as this. Rosemary should have returned, must soon. Where could Ken be? She couldn't imagine. Yes, she could. Probably he was lost in a book at the branch library.

  Dinner at a quarter of six.

  She would start dinner.

  They knew the dinner hour.

  The radio still played. She felt a bit martyred in this mysterious loneliness and she turned it off, feeding a grievance.

  She went into the kitchen and began to prepare their dinner. It would be very simple. Ethel approved of a spaghetti dinner, inexpensive and nourishing and easy to put together—these packaged brands. She dumped the boughten sauce out into a pan. Thought better of this. One ought to doctor up a boughten sauce, she knew. Ethel chopped an onion fine and put it into the sauce. She was not a sensitive cook. She had eaten what restaurants put before her, for so many years. Food was food. It was either cheap or it was expensive. Still, she realized that she ought to have sauteed the onions. Perhaps in the olive oil? What did Ken mean it for, anyway? The bottle didn't hold enough for a salad dressing, Ethel did not like it in a dressing, having made do with cheap vegetable oils for so

  long. Surely not for fruit! No, he must have fancied the taste of olive oil in the spaghetti sauce. Perhaps it was some fancy of Rosemary's.

  She grimaced but took the bottle down and turned the cap. Oh, well . . . she dumped it into the saucepan. She hoped it would not taste too much. She washed out the bottle and set it upside down to drain. King Roberto stood on his head. Ethel filled a large pot with water for the pasta.

  She began to cut up fruit for salad. She doubted the lettuce would be crisp at all. Five thirty-four and nobody home yet.

  Ethel began to set the table in the dining alcove of the living room. From here she could see the driveways and she heard and saw Paul's car come in and a great load of people begin to get hastily out of it. Ethel averted her eyes. It was beneath her to spy on the neighbors. A party, she presumed. The word "party" meant something lightweight to her, timewasting, profitless chitchat. (Nobody ever asked Ethel to parties.)

  Now the table was set. The water at a boil. The sauce ready enough. She turned it low. She mixed the salad.

  When the clock said twenty of six, Ethel felt injured. She threw the pasta into the boiling water, and went into the living room and sat down with her back to the mantel to watch the clock on the opposite wall.

  She would knit for nine minutes.

  Then dinner would be ready. And they should remember and be considerate. She was always considerate.

  At eleven minutes of six she marched to the kitchen.

  She heard their feet.

  "Where on earth have you been?" said Ethel heartily. "I see you're together . . ."

  "Yes," said Mr. Gibson, "we are together." He was a little surprised to see the same old Ethel, standing on both feet in her accustomed way, vigorous and sure of herself.

  "Dinner is exactly ready," said Ethel ."Now, you just have time to wash. There is nothing for you to do, Rosemary. I've done it alh Now, get to the table while I drain this and mix in the sauce. Shoo!" said Ethel, indulgently.

  Meekly, they crossed the kitchen. But they kissed in the hall.

  "Doesn't know . . ." said Mr. Gibson wonderingly.

  "No, she doesn't seem to. They aren't broadcasting your name . . ."

  "Well, we must tell—"

  "Yes . . ."

  •TSTot easy."

  "No." The sweet was so very sweet.

  "Everybody ready?" hallooed Ethel.

  Mr. Gibson let Rosemary go and he went into his own place. It already looked antique to him, a former way of life. Could he have books in a cell, he wondered? Alas, he couldn't have Rosemary. Face reality. Face wicked folly. Face love. Face it, that you are beloved.

  He washed, musing, perceiving that Ethel was right. Or somewhat right. He had not seen clearly his own motives. He had rationalized. He had plastered a black philosophy in the mind over a quivering wound in the heart. Although it was not really that simple, either. Still, worms might have eaten him. . . . Well, he knew a little more now. He knew he had been too suggestible, too quick to abandon his own faiths. He ought to have trusted himself better.

  Ethel made us both doubt ourselves, he mused, gave us that terrible feeling that one cannot trust oneself, no use to try. Such doubt as this, in quantity, judiciously used, might be a tonic and a medicine. But oh, too much, swallowed blindly at a bad time, had shaken him to his foundations.

  It was dangerous stuff.

  He met Rosemary in the hall. Their hands touched' They went across the living room to the dining alcove.

  "Sit ye doon," said Ethel with ponderous good will and forbearance. "You naughty children." Her eyes were wise and speculating. She'd soon "know" where they had been.

  They sat them down. Ethel spooned portions of spaghetti from the steaming mass in the wooden bowl. "Confess," she said. "What have you been up to?"

  "There was a little mixup," said Mr. Gibson. He stared at the spaghetti, not feeling any appetite.

  Rosemary nervously took up her fork. "We'll tell you about it, as best we can," she began. Dear Rosemary, brave enough to try to help him tell.

  "I suppose you've had a talk?" said Ethel, giving them one of her looks. "Now, my dears, it is not my business

  and I do not pry. It is your privilege to have your little secrets—"

  Rosemary put the fork down abruptly. "Any decision that will affect me," said Ethel kindly, "I'm sure you will tell me about." "Yes," said Rosemary steadily.

  Mr. Gibson saw, in Ethel's eyes, himself, the lamb, the softhearted, the unworldly, the bom bachelor, wifeless, living on into old age with his devoted spinster sister. Doomed to this. It was not true.

  "We are very much in love, Ethel," he said quietly and firmly, "Rosemary and I."

  Ethel's eyeballs swiveled and a blank look came down. But her mouth twitched in tiny disbelief, and the veiled eyes wondered. She did not speak.

  But Rosemary spoke, "Just what was said—" "What . . . ?"

  "Just what was said. That's what is meant, Ethel." "I'm so very glad," said Ethel in a false-sounding flutter. "But don't let dinner get cold . . ."

  She didn't believe them. Her face remained blank but Mr. Gibson had an image of her thoughts, writhing and scrambling to detect some "real" meaning behind what he had said . . . until they writhed like . . . like a bowl of spaghetti. He couldn't stomach the stuff. However, he had better eat her dinner or offend her. He turned his fork. Ethel's fork thrust into her spaghetti. Suddenly, people were shouting. Startled, they all looked toward the window.

  Six people steamed off Paul's porch and came roaring across the driveway.

  "Gibson! Hey! Hey!" the bus driver was shouting. Mr. Gibson skipped to the front door nimbly, limp and all. He was terribly, amazingly, glad to' see them. Life throbbed in the house suddenly when in trooped Lee Coffey with Virginia on the end of his arm. Then Theo Marsh—flippety-flop—his seamed face beaming, and yoimg Jeanie, ducking lithely under his waving limbs. And then Paul, holding the door for the looming up of Mrs. Boat-right, who came in like an ocean liner. "We found it!" they all shouted.

  "Everything's under control," yelped Lee, who was waving a sheet of paper. "The marines have landed! We did it, after all!" He pounded Mr. Gibson on the back rather violently. "No sting! O grave, where is thy...!" he babbled.

  "Tell us!" screamed Rosemary, over the noise, "one of you--"

  "This Jeanie child," roared Theo Marsh, "this Jeanie is so sound and intelligent that I am lying in the dust at her feet. Fool! Fool, that I am. My life! My work!" He snatche
d the paper from the bus driver.

  "But what—?"

  The nurse said, "Well, tell them!" Then she told them. "It was Jeame who asked Theo to draw the face he'd seen."

  "And he drew it so well," cried Jeanie aglow, "that Grandma recognized her!"

  The paper was thrust under Mr. Gibson's nose. A few pencil lines—a face, a beauty.

  "Mama said it was Mrs. Violette," yelled Paul, "and I couldn't believe her. I never thought she was so darned lovely."

  "Have eyes ... and see not," droned the artist. His hair stood on end. He held the drawing in both hands and moved it softly to and fro. "Has she ever done any modeling?" he crooned. "These exquisite nostrils!"

  "But what," gasped Mrs. Gibson, "What happened!"

  "Virginia called up her house." explained Lee excitedly. "This Violette, or whatever. And it was this Violette. Some sister or other was there, and this sister says, "Yes she had it."

  "This sister ha—?"

  "Mrs. Violette had it!" boomed Paul. "She's gone to. the mountains. She took it with her! But Mrs. Boatright called the police ..."

  Lee said, "And she's buddies with the high brass. She told them what to do, all right." He spanked Mrs, Boatright on the shoulders. "Hey, Mary Anne?"

  "They will stop her car," said Mrs. Boatright calmly, "or truck, as I beheve it is. We secured the license number. An all-points bulletin. The organization is quite capable." Mrs Boatright was beaming like Santa Claus, for all her calm.

  "So you see!" gasped Virginia. "She's not going to use it en route. How could she? So you are saved!"

  Ethel stood there. "Furthermore," said Mrs. Boatright, looking around as if this were a committee, "I see no reason, at all, since there has been no catastrophe, for any further proceeding. Justice will not be served by publicity or by punishment. Mr. Gibson is not going to kill himself. Nor will he ever do such a thing as he did. I do believe that I convinced Chief Miller ... If not, I will."

  "You did already," cried Lee. "You beat it into him, Mary Anne. Believe me, you were superb! So All's Well that Ends Well! Hey? Hey?"

  "Hey?" joined Theo.

  Rosemary made a little whimpering sound of relief and staggered and drooped into a chair.

  "Is there any brandy?" said the nurse anxiously, observing this collapse vsdth a professional eye.

  Ethel stood there. She had no idea what was happening. She understood nothing. "Brandy in the kitchen," she said mechanically, "left-hand cupboard, over the sink ..." Her face went into a kind of social simper. She expected to be introduced to them all.

  But the nurse ran toward the kitchen with the bus driver on the end of her arm.

  The telephone rang and Mrs. Boatright rolled in her swift smooth way to answer it.

  It was Theo Marsh who turned, elbows out, chin forward, eyes malicious, and said loudly, "So this is Ethel? Lethal Ethel?"

  "Really," said Ethel, turning a dull red, "who are these people!"

  Mr. Gibson, trembling in every limb, had fallen into a chair himself. He realized that Ethel was completely at a loss. She. was not on the same level as the rest of them. She couldn't understand their swift communications. She'd been insulted besides . . . But he could not speak, for he was saved who had been doomed, and he tingled and was dumb.

  Rosemary said weakly, "We were just going to tell you—just a min—" She gasped to silence.

  There was a silence as they all understood this with surprise. Ethel did not know?

  Mrs. Boatright spoke into the phone, "Yes, he is here. . . . But may I take a message—? The Laboraory? Ohy I see. But it has been found, you know, and no harm done at all. . . . Oh, you did? . . . No, you couldn't have known at that time. ... I see. . . . Oh no, it was never

  loose upon the public. That was just an error. . , ." She went on murmuring.

  Out in the kitchen the nurse found the brandy with dispatch, but then Lee, with enterprise, embraced her. They stood in a clinch. A green paper bag lay on top of the other trash in the kitchen wastebasket. The bottle, with King Roberto's picture on it, stood upside down on the counter. But they whispered, and they were not looking at the scenery.

  In the living room, Theo bared his particolored teeth at Ethel. (Mrs. Boatright was too busy on the phone to restrain him, for now she was calling to have a car sent.) So Theo said, "Ethel herself? The dead-end kid? The doom preacher? The amateur psychiatrist?"

  Ethel looked as if she would choke.

  "I cannot see," she cried, hoarse with rage, "why a perfect freak of a strange old man is permitted to come in here and call me names! Until somebody in this room makes sense, I intend to eat my dinner, which—" her voice rose to a scream— "is getting cold!"

  Ethel never could bear an interruption in her schedule, or any surprises. She went to the table and sat down with a plop and plunged her fork blindly into the congealing mass of the spaghetti. Theo Marsh drifted after her. He leaned on the wall and watched—his head cocked.

  But to Mr. Gibson, in the chair, in the living room, his senses were returning. His eyes were clearing. He had assimilated the news, the wonderful surprise. He was saved. He was free. He loved and was loved and nobody was going to die of the poison, and prayers are really answered for all a human being dares to know, and he looked about with relish to receive the sense of home— his dear—his earthly home.

  And his breath stopped.

  "Rosemary! he cried. "What is that? On the mantel?"

  "What, darling?" Rosemary, who had risen, restless with joy, moved, drunken with relief. "This?" She took a ball of mustard-colored string up in her hand. "There's money here," she said wonderingly, "where the blue vase used to stand."

  So Mr. Gibson, his wits working as fast as ever they had in his life, quickened with terror, plunged like a quarterback between Paul and Jeanie past the body of

  Thee Marsh to seize the loaded fork from the hand of his sister, Ethel.

  "Mrs. Violette was here!" he shouted.

  "Really, Ken, I couldn't say," said Ethel huffily. "But you left every door in this house unlocked and we could have been robbed . . ." She was livid with anger.

  "Olive oil!" he shouted. "A bottle of olive oil! Where is it?"

  "In the sauce," said Ethel. "I presumed you meant it for the sauce." Her brows were at the top of their possible ascent. "Have you gone mad?" she inquired frigidly.

  At this moment the nurse and the bus driver came on loud quick feet. "What's this!" Virginia said. She had a glass of brandy in one hand and a small empty glass bottle in the other, which bottle she shook at them.

  "And this! Hey!" puffed Lee Coffey, showing them the green paper bag.

  "It's here" said Mr. Gibson. "Don't touch it, Ethel! It is a deadly poison!"

  "Poison?" she said recoiling.

  Mr. Gibson scraped spaghetti off all three plates into the bowl and then he took up the bowl in a grim clutch. "It must have been Mrs. Violette who spoke to me," he told them. "She did have to go to the bank. I remember she said so. She took the bus, down and back. She spoke the second time when she saw me leave it in the seat. She knew it was mine. She brought it back with the string!"

  "She is so very honest . . ." said Rosemary awesomely.

  "That's it?" cried Theo. "You got the poison, there?"

  "It's here. And it's been here all afternoon," said Mr. Gibson, and he took the bowl tenderly with him and sat down and held it on his lap and bowed his head.

  "We must inform the police," said Mrs. Boatright briskly—but with deep pleasure.

  "We are all heroes," said the bus driver.

  But Jeanie Townsend, girl heroine, stood with all the other heroes, and frowned. "But why doesn't Miss Gibson know about the poisoned olive oil?" she asked. "I heard them telling all about it ... on her radio. This one, right here."

  "I . . . don't under—what poison?" said Ethel, rising, tottering. "I don't understand. Olive oil?" Paul began, "He stole it from my lab . . ." "The laboratory called earlier," said Mrs. Boatright

  sharply
. "They were just on the line. They had discovered their loss. The police had not got to them then. But surely, they must have told you about your brother who had the only opportunity—"

  "I—took a message," said Ethel thickly. "Nobody mentioned . . . poison? Did Ken have poison?" Her eyes rolled.

  "He was going to do himself in," said the bus driver chattily. "But he thinks better of it now."

  "Do himself . . . what? Please . . ."

  "He thinks better of it now," said Rosemary shakily. "Oh, darling, have we really found it?"

  "Right here," said Mr. Gibson. "I've got it." He tightened his tight fingers. Rosemary looked angelic, suddenly, as if she would now fly up to the ceiling on great white wings.

  "Je-ust a minute," said Theo Marsh. He looked at Lee Coffey. "What have we here?" he inquired. > "Hoist?"

  "Hoist! Hoist!" croaked the bus driver. "I see what you mean. With her own petard." He flung out one arm.

  "Uh-AwIiI"' said Theo. "We better analyze this. Now, Ethel . . ." He rounded upon her. "You know, of course, that we are all impelled by subconscious forces. Primitive and low. Hey?" (He had picked up the bus driver's "hey.")

  Ethel looked absolutely stupid.

  "You say you didn't 'hear' the warning? Hah-hah-hah." The artist gave forth a mirthless sound. "But the subconscious hears all things, my dear. Now, you know that. Then the laboratory phoned. But told you nothing? Nor did you ask?"

  "Likely story, all right," said Lee cheerfully. "Where was your subconscious . . . hey? All God's chillun got sub—"

  "Her subconscious was putting two and two together," said Theo, shouting him down. "Therefore it is obvious, is it not, Ethel? You wished to kill your brother and his wife. You must have."

  Ethel stared at him.

  "Because you nearly did kill them, you know," said Theo. "There is a deadly poison in that sauce. Don't try to tell us you never 'meant' to do it." He put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest. He looked like the sheriff in a Western.

  "I , , ." croaked Ethel, "I had no warning ... I don't

  understand. . . . Please." Her wits seemed to return. "You mean we would have become ill?"

  "You would have become dead," said the bus driver. Her eyes popped, staring.