Hit List

thing to have,” she said. “I knew I hadn’t screwed up, and even so I took a good look at the bottom of the one I wound up with, looking for the telltale pinprick.”
    “You used a hypodermic needle.”
    She nodded. “I don’t know why I didn’t just palm the chocolate and get rid of it,” she said, “but somehow I felt compelled to eat it. I didn’t see a pinhole on the bottom, so of course I decided it had sealed itself in the course of being handled. So I told myself, the hell, either it’s in the stars or it isn’t, and I ate the chocolate.”
    “Thinking it might be poisoned.”
    “Knowing it wasn’t, but yes, thinking it might be. And wouldn’t you know it had a nut in it, and I was sure I was tasting bitter almonds.”
    “You used cyanide.”
    “That’s the thing,” she said. “I didn’t, I used something else, it’s got a chemical name a mile long, and who even knows what the hell it tastes like? Not bitter almonds, I’ll be willing to bet, but that’s what I decided I was tasting, and, well, you can imagine what went through my mind.”
    “All while you’re pretending to enjoy the chocolate.”
    “Smacking my lips over it. ‘Oh, Louise, these are so good.’ Which is just brilliant, because of course she offers me another. ‘No, I don’t dare,’ I said, and truer words were never spoken. So I sat there and waited for her to pick the candy with the prize in it.”
    “Couldn’t you just go home?”
    “And wait for nature to take its course? No, because I had to search the place, remember?”
    “Oh, right.”
    “And I also had to hear all about my boyfriend and how Jupiter trined Pluto in his twenty-second house.”
    “I think there are only twelve houses.”
    “There used to be, but then the developers came in.”
    “I never understood that part, the houses. Anyway, what boyfriend?”
    “The one I made up. A handsome widower who had taken an interest in me. Keller, I had to have some reason to go see her again. I made up a boyfriend and made up a birthday for him, and she was doing his chart and seeing if it was compatible with mine.”
    “And was it?”
    “We were going to have problems, and it wouldn’t work out in the long run, but she felt it was worth pursuing for the time being. Of course he didn’t exist and she had the wrong birthday for me, but other than that it was right on the money.” She rolled her eyes. “And I’m pretending to listen to all this crap, and what I’m doing is waiting for her to pop a chocolate. But she’s too caught up in what she’s telling me, and when she finally stops to catch her breath and actually does take a piece of candy, it’s the wrong one. Which I don’t know, of course, until she bites into it and nothing happens.”
    “Jesus.”
    “What’s interesting,” she said, “is the way my mind worked. You know, I started out feeling sort of bad about the whole thing. She was a nice woman, and she was trying to help me out, and it was a shame what I had to do. But then, when she keeps not picking the right chocolate . . .”
    “You got angry with her.”
    “That’s right! She was making my life difficult, she was refusing to cooperate, she was not doing what she was supposed to do. Does that happen with you?”
    “All the time. Like it’s their fault that they’re hard to kill.”
    “I wanted to yell at her. ‘Eat the chocolate, you fat slob!’ But I just sat there, and I got to a point where I almost forgot about it, and then she took a piece of candy and bit into it, and bingo.”
    “And?”
    “It was worse than the other time. She made these sounds, got this expression on her face. Thrashed her arms around, flopped all over the place. There was a moment there when I would have stopped it if I could. But of course I couldn’t.”
    “No.”
    “And then she stopped flopping and gave a long sigh and it was over. And then I didn’t feel anything, not really, because what was the point? She was dead. She didn’t feel anything and neither did I.”
    “You must have wanted to get out of there.”
    “Of course, but I had things to do. First I waited to make sure she was dead, and then I went on an expedition. I found a file with your name on it. It had what I guess was your chart, and some notes I couldn’t make head or tail out of. I found my file, too, under the name I’d given her. I took them both and got rid of them.”
    “Good.”
    “I went through her appointment book. This was my third