The Simple Way of Poison by Leslie Ford

possible, it couldn’t be. But it was. When at last I put down the phone and turned to go back into the drawing room, Iris Nash was in the door looking at me. She knew instantly, without my saying a word.
    “Poor Angie,” she said softly.
    “You’d better go to bed for a couple of hours,” I said. It seemed to me—and in spite of the Fifth Commandment—that Angie’s difficulties were definitely behind him, Iris’s were just beginning.
    She shook her head, “I don’t want to lie down.”
    We went back toward the drawing room.
    “You’ll think I’m pretty ghastly, I suppose. Maybe it’s just the effect of shock and I’ll come out of it tomorrow. But right now I don’t feel any of the things I know I ought to feel. All I really feel is the almost unbearable relief of having Lowell out of my sight, and… and Randall.”
    “Look, darling,” I said. “I know—but there are a lot of things you can’t say… not out loud, you know.”
    “I know.”
    She drew a deep breath and exhaled it slowly.
    “But I’ve got to tell you this. I’ve never told anybody—not even myself, really. I only knew it tonight, while I was waiting for Randall to come home.”
    She looked at me with wide open eyes, like a child.
    “I couldn’t have carried on here another day, Grace. I couldn’t have come into this house tonight, by myself. My father drank too much. I just couldn’t have stood it any longer.”
    She turned away with a faint sudden smile on her lips.
    “I would have left before, except—and you’ll think this is pretty funny—I couldn’t bear to leave Lowell alone here with him. That and another reason that doesn’t matter now.”
    She sat down and spread her hands out before the dying fire.
    “I don’t know what it’s going to be like tomorrow, or next month, but right now I feel just as if I’d been struggling through a horrible nightmare, and had waked up suddenly and found… everything quite sane and lovely again.”
    “Look here,” I said. “I’m sure you’d better get a lawyer. I’m going to call up a man I know and find out who to get. You stay here.”
    She nodded. I went out into the pantry again and closed the door. Then, with only a very faint qualm, I dialed Colonel Primrose.
    When he answered I said, “Tell me who to get for Iris.”
    I’m sure he hadn’t been asleep, that he knew I’d call and had just been waiting.
    “Call Belden Doyle in New York in the morning,” he said calmly. “I’ll get in touch with him. He’ll be expecting you. Now you go to bed, both of you.”
    That was simple to say, and it was simpler to do then than it was later, when each time I closed my eyes I opened them to find the net around Iris Nash drawing tighter and tighter, until it seemed there was no human agency that could release its strangling hold—not even Belden Doyle, who was after all too human.
    I put down the phone and went back to Iris. She was sitting motionless where I’d left her, staring into the dying fire. Her lips moved. I leaned down. “I never knew what happened to make him change so much,” she whispered.
     
    I’m not sure which I dreaded most when I opened my eyes in the Nashes’ blue guest room at eight o’clock and remembered all at once why I was there: the morning meeting between Iris and Lowell, or the return of Captain Lamb with the report from the autopsy. I suppose it was the first because it seemed the more imminent. I rang for the maid. When she came in—scared pea-green—she brought me a bag with my daytime clothes that Lilac had sent over.
    “Oh, it’s horrible, Mrs. Latham,” the girl said, in a hushed voice. “But they’ll never make me believe she did it. I never believed she poisoned Miss Lowell’s dog either. Miss Lowell will never be the lady she is if she lives a hundred years.”
    I looked at her, a little surprised at her vehemence. She was a large apple-cheeked girl with blue eyes and light hair, vaguely familiar though I couldn’t