Creature Discomforts

living room. Since the one-story cottage was uninsulated, the interior walls and the high ceiling showed bare wooden planks and beams. The grain of the wood and the age-darkened knotholes made the kinds of eye-of-the-beholder pictures you see in clouds. The living room had one obviously new feature: a sliding glass door that led to a deck. At the far end of the room was an old fieldstone fireplace with a raised hearth. Bookshelves filled the walls on either side of the fireplace. Grouped invitingly around a glass-topped coffee table in front of the hearth was a set of white wicker furniture with fat cushions covered in a cheerful print of pastel flowers. At the opposite end of the room, by the kitchen, was an almost antique dining-room table with six mismatched chairs that somehow belonged together. Against a wall near the table, a small desk held a tall pile of notebooks and manila folders, and a combination telephone and answering machine with the message light blinking.
    The digital display showed one message. I didn’t want to hear it. In fact, the innocuous flashing of the tiny red light made my heart pound. In a desperate effort to relieve the stupid, senseless tension, I pressed the Play button. “Holly? Bonnie here." Nothing dire so far. Bonnie, whoever she was, sounded altogether friendly and pleasant. What was I expecting? Not, in any event, what I heard next. “Just wondered about any progress you might’ve made on the arsenic front,” Bonnie added blithely. “Give me an update when you have a chance! Hope you’re getting in some hiking. I can use that, too. Bye!"
    Dumbfounded, I replayed the message four times. Arsenic? Progress I might’ve made on the arsenic front? I struggled to connect the poison to my fear. A phrase came to mind: Arsenic and Old Ladies. I knew there was something wrong with it. I couldn’t think what.
     

Chapter Five
     
    THE AMORAL BONNIE engages Holly Winter, professional assassin, to rid her of an inconvenient husband. Or a hated rival. Little care I! Like a catalog clothes shopper mentally trying on an outfit, I slipped into the role of contract killer. It was a bad fit. For one thing, wasn’t arsenic a strange choice of weapon for a hired gun?
    If I were a killer, my most likely victim seemed to be the late Norman Axelrod, who’d apparently been the man who’d fallen to his death. I had, admittedly, been nearby. I did not, however, feel like the sort of indecisive or doubly cautious person who’d have dosed Norman with arsenic and then shoved him onto some rocks; it seemed to me that I’d have made up my mind one way or the other. Besides, if I’d had a contract to do him in, wouldn’t I be reveling in the afterpleasure of a job well done? Or greedily collecting my pay?
    Most of all, what I’d learned about myself so far suggested that I was a decent human being. Caligula probably felt the same way about himself. Still, the worst character trait I’d discovered in myself so far was a harmless, if pathological, attachment to uncooked rice. I was kind to animals. Clean, too!
    At the moment, for example, I was under a hot shower shampooing my hair. Naked, I’d found far less physical damage than I’d expected. My knees were scraped, and the area around my right elbow was badly bruised and abraded, but most of the blood that had pooled with rainwater had been from superficial scratches on my face. The muscles that ached now would scream tomorrow morning. From my scalp rose a large, tender lump that seemed to account for something important. The medical term eluded me. What I caught was a fleeting memory about the need to awaken a victim every two hours to check the pupils of her eyes. For what? When I got out of the shower, I wiped the steam off the mirror over the sink and stared at myself. To my persisting annoyance, I was definitely not Asian. Although my eyes were distinctly Caucasian, there was nothing else wrong with them, at least that I could see, except for fine lines at the comers. The pupils weren’t of different sizes and appeared neither enlarged nor contracted. Great! I wasn’t a drug addict. I tried to guess my age. I remembered looking at my driver’s license, but if I’d read the birth date, I’d now forgotten it. The face was over thirty and under forty. As to its aesthetics, my main response was considerable relief that I looked less like a golden retriever, even a wet golden, than my earlier glance in the rearview mirror had led me to