Poison Most Vial (13 page)

“Ooh, you musta hated Papa Rama.”

“Yes, Rex. And I'm not ashamed to say that I still do. But not enough to want to murder his son. I was researching a more recent case that reminded me of Plaxton—Robert Pelham, the investor, who was tried for the murder of his business partner.”

“That's the guy who lost everyone's money, and now they want it back, right?”

“Right, Ruby, including the university, although DeWitt seems to have recovered its losses. But I was interested in what happened to the evidence. There appeared to be the same kind of tampering in this Pelham case as there was in the Plaxton case. I just smelled a connection.”

“Well?”

“Well what, Rex?”

“Was there a connection?”

“Yes, I think so,” Mrs. Whitmore replied. “Having to do with the chemistry.”

“What is it? The connection, I mean,” asked Ruby.

“You know—technical stuff. The samples were contaminated, the peaks were too hard to see.”

“What do you mean? What peaks?”

“Like I said, it's chemistry stuff. Advanced.”

“What, chemists don't speak English?” Rex said. “Tell us exactly what the problem was.”

She could detect no mischief on those two faces, only curiosity. “All right then.”

Mrs. Whitmore marched into the kitchen and returned with three small glasses, each about half-full of something red. She passed one glass to Ruby, one to Rex, and kept one herself.

“Beads?” Rex said. “They're tiny.”

“I have worked with beads since I was a little girl,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “Someday I'll show you my work. But for now, it's more important that you tell me if you can see any differences between the beads in the glasses.”

After minutes of staring at the tiny plastic spheres, they gave up. “They're too small,” Ruby said.

“That's right. And so are molecules, the basic units that define any substance, like a poison. But molecules are real,
just like these beads, and they have different weights and different masses, just like these beads do.”

“But how can you tell?” Rex said.

“Only by reading the packages, for the beads,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “But there is another way, and I'm going to show it to you.”

She went to the kitchen and returned with another glass, also full of red beads. “This glass contains a mixture of the beads. It's more like what we see when we analyze blood: There is a mixture of molecules in there, and they're too small to see any difference.”

“But we know they're different sizes, right?” Ruby asked.

“Precisely. Now, how would you separate them? I'll take any ideas.”

After several minutes, Rex said, “I know. Filter. Filter them, like you do when you sift flour. Small enough filter and only the small ones will get through.”

“Good. But not good enough,” said Mrs. Whitmore. “Remember, in the blood there are many substances you don't even know are there. Are you going to build some kind of filter for every one? No, there's a better way.”

She cleared the table and placed a shiny silver tray in the center. Next to the tray, positioned to blow across the middle from side to side, she put a small fan. “This is a demonstration I used to give to visitors to the lab.”

Mrs. Whitmore took a spoonful of the mixed beads, poured them on one end of the tray, and tipped the tray slightly. The beads all rolled to the other side.

“I don't see any difference,” Ruby said.

“No, the speed at which they roll down the tray isn't good enough to separate these molecule-beads, either,” the woman said. “But watch this.”

She gathered the beads into one corner of the tray, turned the fan on, and again tipped the tray. By the time the beads rolled to the other end, they had separated into three clumps. “See that? The wind from the fan pushes the lightest beads farthest, and the heaviest ones the least. It has separated them by size, by mass. We do the same thing chemically to detect substances in the blood, by the masses of the molecules.”

“What's that called?”

“The process is called mass chromatography. The instrument that does it is called a mass chromatograph.”

“Oh yeah,” Ruby said. “I remember those from the lab.”

“Well, Ruby, now you know roughly how they work,” Mrs. Whitmore said.

“So what's the tampering part? What happened in those cases?”

“Oh. Right. Well, if the blood sample becomes compromised—if I dump a whole bunch of molecule-beads into
the glass that are similar to what I'm looking for—then it's very hard to tell what I have. It's too messy.”

“And that's what happened in this, whatyoucallit, the Pelham case?”

“Plaxton. Yes, it did. And it appears the same happened in the Pelham one that Rama was investigating. And it was deliberate. The Rama Jr. lab has much more advanced instruments and procedures—someone messed up the samples on purpose.”

Ruby slumped. “Plaxton, Pelham—it's—Everything's too confusing. I just want them not to take Dad away.”

Mrs. Whitmore looked directly at the girl. “It's confusing because you are trying to see everything at once, child. The murder itself is almost always a very simple act. In fact, let's focus on just one small part of it:
How
. How did Roman, or whoever it was, manage to put the poison in Rama's tea without the man noticing?”

“He came from the outside, from that courtyard,” Rex said. “We thought of that.”

“But when? Rama was presumably there the whole evening. And your father fixed his tea. Isn't that correct, Ruby?”

“Well, yeah,” said Ruby. “But we thought maybe Rama was napping or something. He was always in there late.”

“Rama napping? Never. He worked like a man possessed. Like his father. The man wouldn't know how to nap.”

“Well, then,” Rex said, “how?”

Mrs. Whitmore was pacing again, her face flushed, drumming her fingers against her hip. All the old habits coming back, she thought. “One step at a time, one step at a time,” she was saying.

Ruby turned to the page in her sketchbook where she had diagrammed the lab.

“The answer is not there, my dear. It's in here.” Mrs. Whitmore placed her hand briefly on Ruby's head. “You are the only one among us who has spent time in that lab. Enough time to know its rhythms, its routines. Something is missing, and you have it.”

Ruby's head dropped. “But what? He hardly ever came out of that office. The door was closed. If he didn't nap . . . ?”

“I don't have the answer, Ruby. Not for this. You must discover it, for it is there.”

“Think, Ruby,” Rex said. “You're gonna get it.”

“I have been thinking!” She was surprised at her own reaction and tried to calm herself, if only for Mrs. Whitmore's sake. “I've done more thinking in the last month or so than I ever have. I'm not going to just get it, Rex. Just because you think so.”

“Don't force it, dear,” Mrs. Whitmore said. “I want you to think in another way. Not logically, as a forensic scientist. You've both been doing that, and it has gotten you far. Now I
want you to do something else. Travel back in your memory. Let yourself be in that lab. See every detail. Watch what people are doing. You can do that, can't you? I know you can. I have seen your drawings. The detail there, the power of your memory to bring back your former life. If anyone can do this, it is you.”

Ruby flinched and turned away. She hated anyone commenting on her drawings. “That's it? I have to imagine what happened, just like that?”

“Not just like that. Take some time. Pay attention to your remembered observations. Something is off here. There's some very essential thing we are not seeing, and I suspect it is something obvious. Rama Sr., the father, who was as much a detective as a forensic scientist, used to say, ‘The only way out is in.' Put yourself there. See the people. See what they're doing. See what they're not doing.”

The woman rose from the table, buttoned her sweater, and moved to the window, her perch. “Sleep on it. Because we can't do any more with what we have.”

It took her almost a day (and a night) to see it.

Ruby parted with Rex at her door, leaving him to wander College, make his usual rounds. She headed straight down to her room and closed the door.

“Dad, I'm OK,” she said when her father knocked to check on her. He knew that meant she wanted to be alone.

Ruby pulled out her favorite sketches, about a dozen in all, and placed them on her bed. She stared at them as if they were so many postage stamps, unfamiliar objects, created by a stranger. All those tar-paper shacks, rusty wire fences, wagon-rutted roads—they seemed to her now to be from a far-distant place, a time long past.

What was happening? She had drawn all those scenes to keep them close—to keep them alive. To remind herself that
it was still there, Spring Valley, Arkansas, still a place that existed. A place she'd go back to.

Now the scenes looked distant to her, dead even. McClarty's. She thought of McClarty's, the drugstore on Main Street where she'd gotten caramels and tart cherry ice cream. How she'd felt when it closed. Boards on the windows, like a few of the other places on Main Street. What was there to do around there now in Spring Valley, to get away from the farm work? Anything?

She had an urge to call Sharon and let it pass. She didn't know the girl well enough, and sure could not imagine inviting her over here, to the Garden Terrace Apartments. The
projects
. That's what they were. Just say so: housing projects. She had moved from a dying Southern farm town to the projects. She had more in common with Rex, or even Mrs. Whitmore, than she did with any of the kids she knew back home, or even the little gods at DeWitt.

Ruby swept the drawings off the bed and turned away. Sat at her desk, did the only thing she could think of. She began to draw.

At first she did not think much about her subject. It was a face, she knew that, a person. She stayed focused on the small things, the shadows around the lips, the slight indentation above the nose, the shape of the eyes. If the eyes looked too oval, or too symmetrical, they looked unreal. After a long
while she looked up and let herself consider the whole picture. It was a simple portrait. A girl's face, kind and open, tilted slightly, with a trace of self-mockery, or something like it, around the eyes.

Lillian Walter, her former friend.

Lillian had hardly called or e-mailed at all in the past year, and her absence lingered in Ruby's head like some important and unfinished thought. Ruby and her dad had never talked much about it, for the same reason that people often leave things unsaid: There was never a good time to bring it up. It was embarrassing and painful for both of them. Now Lillian had her own page in Ruby's illustrated history of Spring Valley.

When she finished, she lay on her bed, on top of her country sketches, and fell into a deep sleep. Her father crept in later, saw the drawing, and sat beside the bed for a while. Around dinnertime, he left a plate of lasagna and a ginger ale on Ruby's bedside table, but let her sleep.

She didn't wake up until early the next morning, before dawn. After a cold lasagna breakfast, she tiptoed out to the living room, careful not to wake her father, and pulled a chair to the window facing DeWitt. The DeWitt Lab School was not going away, and neither was she. It was her school. The little gods were not really a pack of spoiled rats. She didn't know any of them well enough to say so, one way or the other. She hadn't made much of an effort.

And the Gardens was just the Gardens, a place. A place with wig shops and an empty lot and old people who wanted to stop and talk to you. Sister Paulette's was the best bakery she'd ever known, that was a fact. Trevor's Tropical had ginger drops that were spicy and cheap. Even the Woods brothers, the Ministers, had actually saved her skin. The Prime Minister of the Garden Terrace Apartments on College Avenue knew who she was.

She lived here. The Terraces was her apartment building. College was her street. The Gardens her neighborhood. She laughed out loud at that.

Sitting there with her ginger ale, Ruby studied the science library's spires as if they were objects to be drawn, nothing more. Details. The shadows from the eaves. The red-gray of the stone. A stray cord or wire hanging from one tower, now dark and visible against the pearly sky. A tiny bird landing on the tip of a tower, perching for a while, stone still, then flying off.

A window below flared in the rising dawn light, and the sight of it ignited a familiar burn in her gut, the worry for her father, still dangling by a thread despite all her efforts. A note posted on the fridge read,
Keep me as the apple of your eye, hide me in the shadow of your wing
—something from the Bible her dad had been repeating to himself.

She finished her ginger ale, turned the chair sideways,
faced a wall, and let her mind travel deep inside that building. To the lab. How many evenings had she spent there doing homework? Fifty? A hundred? It didn't matter; it was enough. She saw the place now.