Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene by Stuart Palmer Page A

in that moment a sudden chill pass through her flesh. The eyes were dark and lusterless, dead in their sockets, and she had an extravagant notion that they had looked for centuries, through countless reincarnations, on enduring evil. It was absurd, of course. The man was simply an ex-policeman. Probably a debased fellow who had been fired from the force for some kind of corruption, a hound who had joined the hares.
    Being by nature inquisitive, Miss Withers had gathered this information bit by bit during the course of the last hour or so, some from Lenore, who had apparently decided to trust her from necessity if not from choice, and the rest by direct communication with the subjects themselves. Miss Withers was egregiously conspicuous among the hodgepodge of Argonauts aboard the vessel, a flagrant deviation from an abnormal norm who should have stirred up suspicion and distrust simply by her glaring squareness, let alone the mysterious suddenness with which she had appeared among them like death’s companion. The fact that no one did, in truth, betray any extraordinary curiosity about her or animosity toward her, excluding the muttering Prophet in his corner, was an indication, she thought, of the temper of the motley crew, who accepted anyone because anyone might appear, and expected anything because anything might happen. Even, thought Miss Withers grimly, murder.
    “Socrates!” said Miss Withers suddenly.
    Al Fister, who had been looking at Lenore from the corners of his eyes across Miss Withers’ spare bosom, leaped as if the spinster had ripped out a smoking oath and stabbed him with her hatpin for indulging in improper fantasy, which he very nearly had been.
    “What?”
    “Parsnips!” said Miss Withers.
    Al examined Miss Withers with an expression divided between anxiety and apprehension. He had always known, of course, that the old girl was a little balmy, probably the effect of prolonged abstinence, but she had appeared to possess a certain shrewdness combined with admirable tenacity and mental toughness. He had not anticipated that she might under exceptional stress fall apart at the seams.
    “Miss Withers,” he said, “have you flipped?”
    “If you mean what I think you mean,” Miss Withers replied with some asperity, “I most certainly have not. Nor am I likely to. Someone must remain sane in this assembly of maniacs.”
    “I thought I heard you mention Socrates and parsnips.”
    “So I did. A logical association of thoughts. I might have reversed the order, of course, but that’s of no matter.”
    “Well, you know my limitations. UCLA drop-out and all that. Logic isn’t one of my strong points.”
    “Socrates was an Athenian philosopher. Even your limited education should have made you aware of that. He was charged with corrupting the young of the city and was put to death for it, an extreme penalty which, if applied impartially today for the same reason, would have the guilty queued up outside every execution chamber in the country. That, however, is not the point. The point is, the Athenian method of execution was the oral ingestion of poison. Specifically, hemlock. If you are interested, Plato has left us a graphic account of Socrates’ death.”
    “What I’m interested in is what this has to do with anything else you’d care to mention.”
    “If you’ll please not interrupt, I’ll explain. When I was bending over the body of Captain Westering, I detected a faint pungent odor that I couldn’t quite identify. Later, when I sniffed the cream sherry that killed him, I detected the same odor. It was a common odor, one that I had smelled often before, and I’ve just now recalled what it was. It was the odor of parsnips. Hemlock and the parsnip are, I believe, members of the same botanical family. They smell alike, and the deadly roots of the former have the same appearance as the edible roots of the latter. Hemlock grows wild in this area. Livestock is sometimes poisoned by eating it.