He gave her a mock scowl and continued. 'So this one day, I came out in a hurry, jumped in my car and ran down to the grocery store for a jug of milk. When I was coming back across the parking lot, I saw something under my car—that big old gray fuzzball. And yeah, I'd left my windows down again. First off, I thought I'd just drive away and leave it there and act dumb whenever she missed the stupid thing; but being an upright righteous husband —'
'Yeah, sure!' everyone hooted.
'—I decided I'd better try to catch him. Now that cat and me, we never did get along too good, and I called till I was purple before he came out from under my car. Then I had to chase him all over the parking lot and when I finally grabbed him, he gave me such a scratch it dripped blood all the way home. But I'm a special agent for the SBI, right? And he was just a dumb old cat, right? So I did eventually throw him in the car and off we set. He stomped back and forth on the backseat and snarled at me the whole way home. Well, we get home and I pull into the driveway and there's the
Before he could tell us what he did with the feline doppelganger, a white-coated doctor appeared in the doorway. 'Mrs. Knott?' he asked. 'Mrs. Herman Knott?'
Instinctively, we fell silent and clustered around Nadine.
'We've confirmed the cause of your husband's condition,' he said briskly. 'It isn't his heart or a stroke.'
'Then what?' asked Nadine.
'Chronic poisoning,' said the doctor. 'Somehow or other, your husband's ingested a good deal of arsenic over the past week or so.'
CHAPTER 14
SAFETY RULES
The word ran around the room and bounced off the ceiling.
Nadine seemed bewildered. 'Where would he get arsenic?'
The doctor flipped to Herman's admittance chart. 'His occupation is listed as an electrician. Is he also engaged in farming where he might handle insecticides or other poisonous chemicals?'
Nadine shook her head. 'Sometimes he has to crawl up under old houses where they've put out rat poison. Maybe—'
'No, that's warfarin, an anticoagulant.'
'But he's going to be all right, isn't he?' asked Annie Sue. She pushed close to her mother, as if seeking physical comfort and her big blue eyes were frightened. 'He's not going to die, is he?
'Now hush that kind of talk,' said Nadine, but she, too, was shaken. 'Doctor?'
He shook his head. 'I wish I could give you a cut-and-dried answer, Mrs. Knott, but chronic arsenic poisoning's a tricky thing. We don't yet know how much neurological damage there is. The lack of paralysis is encouraging, but the anesthesias in his legs and extremities, the liver involvement—'
We stood numbly as all that medical terminology flowed over us. What it boiled down to was that Herman would probably recover, but it was going to be long and slow—six months or longer—and he might never recover full feeling in his fingers and feet. A wheelchair could not be ruled out.
Nor was treatment itself going to be a simple thing. Some doctors advocated doing nothing. Let the body heal itself. If a more aggressive course were taken, the antidote might be as dangerous as the arsenic itself.
Yet even as we listened, we all kept circling back to the central question: how the devil was he getting arsenic? Because on that point, the doctor was quite clear: Herman had ingested the stuff more than once in the last ten days.
The doctor finished outlining the treatment they planned to use. As he rose to go, he cocked his head and looked around the circle of faces surrounding him. 'You live close to one another? See each other every day? Then perhaps I should check. Is everybody healthy? Any stomach cramps or nausea that won't go away? Summer flu? Dizziness, pins and needles in your fingers or toes? Numbness?'
We all shook our heads, although I saw a considering expression cross the face of Nadine's sister. Her robustly healthy body imprisoned the soul of a hypochondriac.
'Great!' He closed Herman's chart with a snap. 'Oh, one thing more, Mrs. Knott. Someone from Environmental Health will probably be in contact with Mr. Knott and you to try to trace the source of the arsenic. They'll want you to think what you two may have eaten or drunk differently, any places where he eats that you and your family don't, maybe a list of all the locations he's worked lately that might have old arsenic-based paint or wallpaper, things like that. Okay?'
The family milled around as he left, so simultaneously worried and titillated that no one else seemed to notice the looks Dwight and Terry exchanged before following the doctor from the waiting room. I slipped out, too, and hurried down the hall after them. As they rounded a corner, I heard the doctor say, 'Well, yes, I suppose there always is that possibility, Major Bryant.'
'What possibility?' I asked, halting them in their tracks.
The doctor turned and frowned, Terry immediately went into his official secrets mode, but Dwight said, 'I don't believe you've met Herman's sister. This is Judge Deborah Knott, Doctor.'
'Judge?'
'Judicial District Eleven-C,' I said. 'What possibility?'
