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Authors: Benedict Carey

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BOOK: Poison Most Vial
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“Look. He got that thing handcuffed to his wrist!” Rex said. “Like he's carrying nuclear secrets in there, CIA documents and whatnot. Don't that beat all? And you know all's he got in there is a bunch of them grimy headbands he wears.”

“Hey, you do not want terrorists getting their hands on those,” Ruby said.

“Aww, no, you do not, now. Drop one of those into the water supply, paralyze the whole city. Toxic onion rings. Weapons of mass putrification.”

Ruby started to smile when a hissing sound came from behind and someone said, “Lookit there, the poison girl. Who're you and your dad going to take out next?”

Rex turned, his surprise hardening into a cold stare. He
searched the scattering crowd: some high schoolers, others younger, too many kids chuckling and smirking to tell who it was. Another voice called out, “The Poison Rose!”

Ruby clenched her fists.
What a place
, she thought. DeWitt Lab School, all these young geniuses, the sons and daughters of professors: “the little gods,” Rex called them. Didn't even know you existed until they learned that your dad worked in the lab where a crime happened.

What a crime, though! Dr. Ramachandran, the great genius of DeWitt Polytechnic University (which contained the Lab School), poisoned and dead on campus.
Murdered
. Right there in his office in the forensics laboratory where Ruby had been a hundred times, doing homework. The little gods should be begging her for details about the lab if they were half as smart as they thought they were.

“Rex, c'mon, forget it,” she said, turning her friend around. “Let's pull out of here.”

Ruby started counting steps again. Oh, to describe all this to a real friend—to Lillian from back in Spring Valley, Arkansas, where Ruby used to live. Rex and Spider Simon with his briefcase and the little gods: Lillian would scream out loud.

Three plus one, three and one . . . The street from school—she'd describe that, too. College Avenue got stickier and dirtier as it approached their neighborhood, College
Gardens, aka “the Gardens,” with its Caribbean stores, nail shops, wig shops, moldy bars with moldy people in them all the time. And here, smack in the middle, Garden Terrace Apartments, “the Terraces,” the rotting brick-pile tower where she lived.

“What's she always looking at?” said Ruby.

Rex glanced up to the ninth floor where a woman's head was barely visible behind the glare of a window.

“The Window Lady?” Rex shrugged and turned to dash up the steps. “Maybe she got no TV—more later, Ruby.”

The first thing Ruby heard when she pushed through the door of her apartment was a rhythmic sound. Pacing. Her father, in front of the table in their small living room. Pacing, serious, holding a letter, his face squeezed up.

“Dad,” she said. “What?”

“Nothing, Ru,” Mr. Rose said, folding and unfolding the letter, looking for a moment like a little boy, ten-year-old James Rose seeing his first bad report card.

“Ruby, I need to tell you something,” he said.

She waited. She could see the DeWitt crest on the letter. That couldn't be good.

“You know about Dr. Ramachandran, of course,” Mr. Rose began. He was her dad again. “And you know I was working that night, like normal. Well, Ruby, I'm—” His
shoulders fell, and he turned away. “I have to go in for more questioning by the police.”

Ruby had to force her words out. “Can't you, you know, find out what really happened?”

“How, Ru? I have to get a lawyer. I don't even know how to do that.”

“Well, can't you investigate? Ask people at the lab, like they do on TV? You work there.”

“Not anymore, Ruby. Not anymore. My security card was taken away. I can't even get back into the lab. No one who worked there can. I need to talk to someone, I just—I don't know. There's a lawyer comes into Biddy's a lot.”

Ruby did not want her father going down to Biddy Runyan's, not now. Biddy's was one of the bars on College Avenue where the older neighborhood people went. Not the best place on earth to look for a lawyer. Her father often went there when he was upset and was worse when he returned.

Ruby picked up the
DeWitt Echo
and reread the newspaper's story on the Ramachandran murder. Found in his office at a minute before 8 o'clock last Friday. The only people there, other than her dad, were the school's dean, a publicity person, and four graduate students—all of whom Ruby knew.

The university police suspected that the professor had died “from the effects of a monkshood cocktail,” the article
said. Some help that was. Ruby sneaked another look at her dad, who now seemed to be talking mostly to himself.

“I don't believe it,” Mr. Rose was saying. “These people at the university, they really think . . . ”

She left him alone. Put a hand on his shoulder, then slipped out into the corridor to get some air, to move, to do something. In her old house in the country, Ruby could have wandered the fields out back, maybe found some empty dirt path, sat there with her sketch pad, and drawn until dark. Or walked the mile over to Lillian's.

Not here; there were only hallways and the constant need to watch for older kids, the dropouts and users, the kids who might come after you. In moments Ruby was up four floors, knocking on apartment 1113. A radio was on, voices and cooking smells radiated through the door.

“Ruby, what you doing?” said Rex, holding the door half-open.

“Rex, you coming out?” If she didn't get him out in one
second, his mom or dad would come to the door and she'd be invited into the chaos of that apartment, with Rex's twenty brothers and sisters and Aunt Esther and Uncle Neville talking and eating and talking; it would be winter before she made her way out. “C'mon, quick.”

Rex shouted something over his shoulder and escaped into the hall. “OK, OK, why you all dialed up?”

“Need to talk to you for a second. Not here.”

He led her down the hall, around one bend and another, up some stairs to a landing between floors thirteen and fourteen that had a view east over the city and was usually off-limits; a gang of older kids played cards and smoked on this landing most days. “Don't you worry, they won't be back up here till later,” Rex said. “What's up, now?”

“Trouble, that's what,” Ruby answered. “My dad, I mean. I think they think it's him. The university police—that he's guilty. I never seen him so scared.”

“But he didn't do it—the police will find out, that's their job. He just needs to tell the truth.”

“I don't know, though,” said Ruby. “He already talked to them once. I mean, what if you tell the truth and nobody believes you? My dad's not exactly . . . He's a janitor. They don't really care what he says.”

Rex put a hand on her arm. “Aww, now, don't you look like that. It's gonna be all right. Hey, wait. You know what?
You should figure out what happened. Who really killed Dr. Rama. Do it your own self. You know everybody who works there, right?”

Ruby was taking deep breaths. “I—yes, I do, but—Investigate how? I'm a kid; how do I even start?”

“You're asking me? I never had a good idea in my life. Seriously, not a one. But you could maybe—well, no, maybe not.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, really, what?”

“It wasn't a good idea.”

“I don't care, it's something—tell me already.”

“You could talk to the Window Lady, that's all I was thinking. I heard she used to work as some crime investigator type of thing. A long time ago.”

“What—how come you never told me?”

“I just did. Besides, I'm not sure it's even true. And I can't—I probably shouldn't go with you.”

“What? We'll just talk to her, that's it.”

Rex looked away. “Nah, it's OK. You should do it, though.”

“Huh?” Ruby studied him for a moment. “You scared? You are. I can tell. She's, like, ninety. You worried she's gonna ram you with her wheelchair or what?”

“Look, Ruby, I never should've said anything. It's nothing.
I just heard she got a fake eye, that's all. Like a marble up in there. I can't be around that.”

“What—where'd you hear that?”

“Jimmy said it.”

Jimmy, the youngest of the three Woods brothers. The Minister of Information, he called himself. Jimmy's older (and much scarier) brothers were the Minister of Defense and the Prime Minister. Kids believed everything Jimmy Woods said, for some reason.

“Rex, c'mon.
Jimmy
?”

“I mean, Ruby, what if she sneezes or something? I don't want to be there when that cue ball is rolling around on the floor . . . ”

“Rex! Stop—this is serious.”

Ruby paced in a circle, counting three and one, three plus one. Unbelievable. A fake eyeball. It's something Rex himself would have made up. She pulled her sketch pad out of her back pocket and wrote something down.

“OK, ninja warrior, I have a plan,” she said. “We'll ask the Window Lady for help, and you don't have to meet her. You won't even have to see her if you don't want to.”

“Like how?”

A minute later, kneeling beside Rex outside the door of apartment 925, Ruby wondered if she'd ever had a worse plan. She pushed a note under the door, knocked
twice softly, and fled behind Rex down the hall to the stairwell.

Peeking back around the corner, Ruby saw a light under the door blink once, twice; the note disappeared. “I feel like I'm in kindergarten,” she whispered.

“Seriously,” Rex said. “I'm gonna jet up these stairs if she comes out.”

But she didn't.
Strange
, Ruby thought. You spend all day watching people from on high and don't even look when someone knocks on your door. Maybe the Window Lady was scared of something, too.

“Let's walk past, all casual,” Ruby said, moving out into the hallway.

She had a strong urge to knock again, harder. This lady was her only lead, her only hope right now, and—maybe it was just impatience for a stroke of luck on a bad day—she stopped and pounded on the door: one, two, three.

Ruby turned to Rex—“There, that should wake her up”—as the door swept open and a man with no shirt and a long white beard towered over them.

“Mr. Nelson, Mr. Nelson, we don't mean nothing, sir!” Rex said. “We playing, is all.”

Ruby couldn't move or speak. The Medicine Man, people called him, the tallest, darkest, most savage-looking human she'd ever seen.

“You play outside, not in the corridor. There's people living in here, boy,” the man said. He gave them a wild, frowning stare, slammed the door, and turned the lock.

“OK, Mr. Terraces Expert, that's good work,” Ruby said when her breath returned. “So she lives in 925, huh?”

“Yeah, I probably mighta got that wrong.”

“Probably mighta? You almost got us eaten. Man probably drinks chicken blood in there.”

“You sicker than I am, Ruby. I forgot about this here ninth floor; the apartment numbers don't line up with the other floors.”

“Good to know. Is there a door we can try where a native healer doesn't pop out like a jack-in-the-box?”

“I'm counting the windows in my head right now,” Rex said. “Don't say anything to mess me up . . . It's 921. Right down there.”

“Oh no,” said Ruby. “You mean the one with the D
O
N
OT
D
ISTURB
sign on it?”

Disturbed Already
, Ruby wanted to write beneath that sign.

The Window Lady never responded to the note Ruby slipped under her door. The two of them had moseyed by the door dozens of times over the weekend, and it didn't ever seem like anyone was home.

“No sound, no movement, not even any light that I could see,” said Ruby as she and Rex ate in the school cafeteria on the following Wednesday. “Maybe she's one of those fake people, you know? What're they called—”

BOOK: Poison Most Vial
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