The Simple Way of Poison by Leslie Ford Page A

quite place her.
    “Where were you last night?” I asked, pouring out a cup of fragrant coffee.
    “Mrs. Nash let us all off right after dinner. She’s awful nice that way. Except Wilkins—he’s the butler except when he drives Mr. Nash.”
    “He’s new, isn’t he?”
    “Yes, ma’am, pretty new. He came this Fall. I’ve been here since May. You don’t remember me, but I came just before you went away in June. I used to work in the bakery—my name’s Molly, I’m Mrs. Murphy’s youngest girl.”
    “I do remember you, very well. Your mother died, didn’t she?”
    “Yes, ma’am. Mrs. Nash lets me come here and go to school in the afternoons.—Mrs. Latham, can’t you make Miss Lowell be nicer to her?”
    “Oh dear!” I thought.
    She flushed crimson, but went on. “Because Wilkins says when the police find out what a dog fight goes on in this house they’ll hang her for sure.”
    “Is there a dog fight?” I asked.
    “Not out loud. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was. It’s just underneath. Miss Lowell’s always doing just what Mrs. Nash doesn’t want her to do, and being mean to Mr. Mac all the time.”
    “I wouldn’t worry about it, Molly, if I were you,” I said.
    “No, ma’am. But… maybe you’d talk to Miss Lowell…”
    I looked at her. There was something pleading, and frightened, in her round wholesome face that startled me.
    “What’s the matter, Molly?”
    She hesitated for a moment, flushing again.
    “Oh, it’s just that this morning, ma’am, when I took her tray in, she was talking to somebody on the phone, telling them she knew her father had been poisoned, because that dog of hers was poisoned.—She kept calling him A. J. That’s Mr. McClean, isn’t it?”
    “Have you said anything about this in the kitchen?”
    “Oh no, Mrs. Latham. I wouldn’t do that.”
    “You see you don’t, Molly. I’ll talk to Miss Lowell.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    She went out. I put down my coffee cup and leaned my head back against the cool pillows. Nothing in the house had seemed to me to make sense, this last week, but this made less. The “A. J.” Lowell had been talking to was Mac’s uncle. He was Randall Nash’s oldest and most intimate friend, Angus was named after him. I tried to remember all I knew about him. Mac, who was A. J.’s brother’s son, had lived with him since he was a small child and both his parents were killed in a train wreck in Colorado in 1915 on their way to the San Francisco Exposition. It was usually said in Georgetown that the reason A. J. had remained a bachelor was that he and Randall Nash both wanted to marry Marie Lowell and Randall got her. I wouldn’t know how true that was. Certainly if he envied Randall the possession of Marie after a short time it only shows there are some people who don’t recognize a break when they get it.
    A. J., I knew, was president of the Colonial Trust Company, had rheumatism and indigestion, lived in a crazy rambling house out Foxall Road, was austere and upright, thought the world had gone definitely to hell and didn’t approve of lip stick and young people drinking. Just how it happened that he did approve of the idea of Mac’s marrying Lowell, when he didn’t approve of at least one-half the things Lowell does, is something that’s always defeated me. However, that’s the way it was. Oddly enough, Lowell and Mac were all for it too, really. The only person who seemed undecided about it had been Randall Nash—not seriously opposed, I think, but certainly not wildly enthusiastic about it. At least not when he’d talked to me in the Spring before I went away.
    But that was all beside the point. What concerned me about Angus James McClean as Molly closed the door and left me alone was that with his devotion to Marie Nash and Randall and their daughter Lowell he combined a strong dislike—or mistrust, or suspicion, or more probably a little of all three— for Randall Nash’s second wife. Since Iris had come to the