Page 120 of The Turning of the Tables

“No problem,” I told him, forcing cheerfulness back into my tone.

“See you tomorrow!”

I hung up, then stared morosely down at my phone.

That was it.

The job was done.

Ward would pay me, probably more than it was worth, I’d guess, and then I’d have to argue with him. It didn’t really matter which one of us won, either way what he was giving me was coming to me out of pity. Yes, I’d done work for him, but if they already knew that the family had been in Richmond in the antebellum period and practiced Voodoo, they didn’t need me to identify chicken blood and arsenic green.

I sighed, then started cleaning up, sending Elliot a text as I got to work.

Did people start doing things for you out of pity after you shifted?

I’m sure they did, but I was a kid.

What happened?

Ward gave me a job he didn’t need done.

The table is amazing, by the way.

It took you that long to go down there?

And how do you know he didn’t need it done?

Because they already knew what the tests would have told them.

But they didn’t know that’s what it would tell them, right?

Was anything new?

I mean. They probably didn’t know the dress was toxic.

My phone started buzzing again. I answered it and put it on speaker.

“Yeah?” I asked Elliot.

“How is adresstoxic?” he wanted to know.

“It was dyed with arsenic,” I replied.

“To murder someone?”

I chuckled. “No, because people didn’t understand chemistry yet,” I answered. “It was a particular color known as Sheele’s Green, named after the German scientist who created it.”

“Why are Germans always the ones coming up with fucked up chemical shit?” he asked.

“Well, this was in the nineteenth century,” I replied. “So it wasn’t Nazis.”

“No, just the assholes who invented mustard gas,” he replied.

The timeline wasn’t far off. “Possibly,” I admitted. “But the intention was to make a pretty color, not to actually poison people.”

“But it did. Poison people.”

“Oh, yes. Including Napoleon.”