The Simple Way of Poison by Leslie Ford Page B

came out of my mouth before I was even conscious of thinking it. She gave a sharp hysterical little laugh. I looked quickly at her; she was steadying herself against the end of the cloak rack. “I’m going to be sick,” she whispered. “Get me some water.”
    I got it. Her hands were cold as ice. She stood there a moment with her eyes closed, then gave me a quick sardonic smile as she handed back the cup. “You’d think I had scenes enough at home without staging one in public all by myself.” The Christmas lights were still gleaming in the giant magnolias outside the Nash house. The light in the hall glimmered softly through the elliptical Adam fanlight over the door.
    “Why don’t you all come in and have a drink?” Iris said. “That’s an excellent idea,” Colonel Primrose said promptly, so promptly that I couldn’t really say no.
    I still wonder what difference it might have made in the days that followed if I’d not been so spineless and had gone home as I should have done. It’s impossible to tell, of course, and anyway we did go in. The door into the library, at the foot of the stairs to the right, was half open. The room was dark except for the small circle of white light thrown by the glass-shaded reading lamp on the dark green and gold leather pad on Randall Nash’s broad flat mahogany desk at the far side, between the windows. In the circle of light was an open book. A pair of horn-rimmed glasses lay on it, the ear bows extended as if they had just been put there.
    But that was not all, nor did any of it explain the sudden, almost imperceptible stiffening in the muscles of Iris’s smooth bare back as Steve Donaldson took her ermine cape and she glanced in through the half-open door. On the desk beside the pad, just out of the circle of light, was a round silver tray, with a decanter of whisky and a soda syphon. Beside the tray an amber highball glass with a silver rim lay on the desk, on its side.
    Iris glanced from the spot of light and the overturned glass up the stairs ahead of us, and took a deep controlled breath. I saw Colonel Primrose cock his head down and follow her gaze with his bright sharp black eyes. I thought he shook his head a little.
    It took only a second or two, all this, before Iris said, quite normally—and if I hadn’t known the danger signals I’d never have noticed anything not perfectly normal about any of this—“Please go in by the fire. I’ll bring the decanter.”
    Colonel Primrose had just taken my coat. He was still standing with it over his arm. We all stood there a moment. Iris went into the library, picked up the glass and put it on the tray, wiped up the spot on the polished mahogany with her handkerchief, and came out again with the tray in her hands.
    She handed it to me. “Take it in, Grace, will you? I’ll just put this in the kitchen.”
    She took the glass. I started into the drawing room with the tray.
    “Wait a second,” she said. “Is there any soda?”
    She came back, put the glass under the syphon and pressed the trigger. A hissing spurt of the gas brought out a couple of drops of charged water.
    “I’ll fill it,” she said. She took the syphon and glass, and went out with Colonel Primrose to the kitchen.
    I went on into the drawing room where Steve Donaldson was standing in front of the fire, staring down into it. He glanced up, the expectant light in his eyes dying when he saw it was only me. I took a potato chip out of the silver bowl on the low Chippendale table in front of the fire and scooped a little of the fresh caviar from the block of ice in the thermos tub. We didn’t seem to have much to say to each other, and were content not to try to make anything up. So we just sat there until Iris and Colonel Primrose came back with the syphon, one of those patent arrangements with cartridges for carbonating your own tap water.
    After that it was very pleasant, and when I suddenly looked at the French clock on the mantel it was after