September 29, 1965
I’m leaving. I just need a little more time to get that old car running again. And then I’ll sneak out after they go to bed.
Together, apparently.
I was going to wait for Daddy to come home from Florida, but I can’t. I need to leave now. I can’t live like this. I can’t stay here another second.
Because I think Peggy and Dickie are trying to kill me.
Last week, I sat down at lunchtime to eat the au gratin potatoes Peggy served in my favorite cornflower CorningWare casserole dish.
It was picture perfect, like something out of the Betty Crocker cookbook. And it’s so much work, to make me an individual casserole each day for lunch when I’d be happy with a peanut butter sandwich and an apple, like she has.
But every day, she goes to all that trouble just for me. And she never eats a bite of it. Never saves the leftovers. Never heats it up in the oven and gives it to Dickie for dinner. In fact, she scrapes anything I don’t eat directly into the garbage.
Yesterday, I watched her like a hawk.
She brought flowers in from the garden, the last hydrangeas and foxglove of the season, and put them in one of those Hull vases that belonged to my mother.
I went into the den and pretended to watchDays of our Lives, but I could see her making my lunch out of the corner of my eye and then I noticed it.
She reached up and snipped a tiny fragment from a foxglove leaf. Then she chopped it up really small and put it in my casserole.
I looked up foxglove in the encyclopedia. Every single part of that flower is poisonous, from the flowers to the stem to the leaves. Eating it causes nausea, headache, skin irritation, and diarrhea. It can also cause foggy thinking and disorientation.
This explains why I’ve been so tired. Why I sleep so much, and why my stomach is upset.
I thought it was grief, when it’s actually poison, in a very small dose.
A large dose stops your heart.
Chapter Seventy-One
Piper
The doorbell rang, and Piper looked up from the diary, fighting the sense of disorientation that came from being abruptly ejected from Dottie’s mind.
“Poison?” Kiersten whispered.
“She must be wrong ...” Rosamund said, shaking her head. “I know he’s awful ... but would he really try to kill her?”
“Peoplemagazine andDatelinealways have stories about people trying to kill their spouses instead of just divorcing them,” Kiersten said, clutching the meat thermometer. “And that’snow.”
Piper gripped the diary so hard her knuckles turned white. “And back in 1965, Dickie had even more motivation to kill his wife. Plus he had means and opportunity. His father-in-law’s money, business, and political connections, the fact that his wife was infertile, his political ambitions, and the social stigma of divorce. It would all make murder a far more palatable option than divorce.”
“If you happened to be a monstrous person with no conscience,” Rosamund added. “Which Dickie obviously was.”
“Oris currently,” Kiersten added.
The doorbell rang a second time.
“Rosamund, can you get the door?” Kiersten asked. “I’ve got to make the rolls.”
“It must be Miles and Valentina and Reggie,” Piper said.
“Wait.” Rosamund wiped her hands on her apron. “Do we tell people about this? Or not?”
They all looked at each other.
