Toxic Fright

     Martha Atwood stared down at her coffee anxiously as her friends and husband chatted around her. There was Claire, Joan, Ed, Logan, and Ted all together in the living room with her and Evan. A few questions came her way, and she managed to answer them briefly, but even so she remained on the outside. She spun the facts around in her head in the hopes that some answer might suddenly come out from them. There was the party, the sickness, the car, and the watcher. She tried to think of something else, some clue that could make sense of the riddle, but there was nothing. She had wracked her brain for hours before, but she had never produced a single break from normality that might complete her puzzle.

     “Martha,” said Claire suddenly, luring the woman out of her contemplation. “You know, you don’t have to stay here with us.” Martha looked up to see her friend’s eyes shine with concern. “I think we can all tell you’d rather be alone, and I don’t know about anyone else, but I promise my feelings aren’t too delicate to allow you a little solitude. None of us will mind if you go back to your bedroom, and if you want your living room back we can always head out for fast food or something.”

     The young mother offered what she hoped was a soft, sincere smile, and said, “I’m fine. I’ve just got a lot of things on my mind.”

     As Martha looked around the room at her guests, she caught her husband staring at her suspiciously. Almost immediately, she glanced away. She hadn’t told Evan the full extent of her suspicions, but she still had admitted that she believed someone was going after their son. He’d said she was being paranoid. Their friends seemed to have felt the same way about her concern any time it slipped out in their presence. Even before Connor had gotten sick she had always come off as overprotective. She had no doubt that they were all wondering why they had been invited over while the child was in bed with a fever.

     “Actually, it was kind of my idea for you all to be here,” Martha said.

     The revelation took nearly everyone by surprise. They had all thought that this was Evan’s idea. They had no idea how hard she’d had to work and how long she’d had to argue in order to make this happen. They had no idea of the focus, the purpose, which filled her at that moment.

     “I don’t really know how to say this, but…think somebody poisoned Connor,” said Martha, spilling out the last four words in one quick breath. As she had expected, the whole room exploded in shock and confusion.

    “What do you mean? You think he swallowed a chemical?”

     “Did the doctor tell you something?”

     “Poisoned? Like poisoned poisoned??”

     Martha raised her hands, pleading for silence, but it was only after the cacophony had run its course that she seemed able to get a word in. Finally, when the room was quiet enough she blurted out, “What I mean is that I think Connor is sick because somebody intentionally poisoned him. The last time he was like this was at New Years for a few days, and it didn’t really fit with any bugs or flus going around. And it was exactly like this. And then there were the car and the watcher…”

     Martha’s voice faded as she realized she was losing her coherency. It had been a hundred little details that had instilled in her this conviction, but she could hardly remember half of them and most of the little things she could remember lost all their strength when taken out of their context in time and experience and put into crude, inadequate words. She had to remember the big clues and explain them as well as she could. There was the party, then the sickness, then the watcher, then the car. Party. Sickness. Watcher. Car.

     The young mother took out her inhaler as she felt her breathing slipping out of her control, sucked in a gasp of medication, and resumed her explanation. “I saw someone standing outside and staring at our house in the middle of the night,” she said. “I think I saw him four times, maybe five, over the weeks after Connor got sick the first time. They never hung around long enough for me to get a picture or even to show Evan, but they were definitely not just walking by. They stood there across the street, wearing a hoodie and sunglasses just like anyone who didn’t want to be recognized. Sometimes they even left little notes on our lawn or the sidewalk, so I wasn’t just seeing things.” Martha paused for a breath, and she went for her inhaler again. She realized the moment she pressed down on the device that it could make her look even more frantic, but at least no one had interrupted yet. “And then two days before Connor got sick again, someone nearly ran him over. He didn’t get hit, but it was only a difference of seconds, and they were going way too fast for a neighborhood. So, uh, I guess that’s mostly it.”

     Martha looked around nervously at her audience, readying herself for criticism. She was not disappointed.

     “Martha,” said Claire slowly. “I’m sure this has been very stressful for you, but I just don’t see murder in any of this. I mean, the illness is strange, especially the fact that he got it again, but human health is very complicated and it does weird things all the time without us looking for some evil meddler. And it’s terrifying that Connor was in so much danger, but there are plenty of reckless drivers who really are just being stupid. None of it means anything”

     Martha nodded, acutely aware of the fact that she hadn’t said a word about the watcher. It was perfectly obvious why: Claire had been avoiding calling her crazy. The young mother, however, was not so protective of her dignity as to let that shadowy figure be ignored.

     “You’re forgetting about the watcher,” Martha said quietly. “The other stuff is just weird, but he’s something else. He’s—if it is a he—the one who ties it all together.”

     This time it was her husband who responded. “Honey,” he said. Evan never used such cliché terms of endearment in normal talk, even when they were being intimate. He only spoke like that when he thought she was being irrational. “I never saw anyone out there, but I did see those few notes. There wasn’t any pattern to them as far as I could tell, and I couldn’t see any connection between them and Connor. One of them was a couple numbers, and the others were just a few random words. Someone wrote them with some private meaning they were supposed to remind him of, and I could have come up with a dozen normal meanings behind each one that had nothing to do with us. In fact, when you showed me them I’m pretty sure I did come up with them. As for the actual person, I imagine I see things in the dark all the time when I know there’s nothing. That’s the way the dark works. No one’s going to think you’re insane if you admit that there might not have been anyone at all.” He put his hand on hers in an attempt to be comforting, and said, “I know it’s hard to see our son being so miserable with nothing you can do about it, and it helps to think there’s something else behind it that you can fight, but he really is just sick. He’ll go through all kinds of trouble in life, but most of it really is just little unhappy accidents—normal, good things that come together in such a way and at such a time that something bad and frustrating pops up. I promise, there’s no evil plot.”

     Martha held her tongue. Everyone assumed that this was about her being scared or frustrated. Why was it so hard to accept that when she said someone had poisoned her son she was talking about anything other than her feelings?

     “Besides,” quipped Ed. “Why would someone want to hurt a little boy? And even if they did, do you really think they’d be so clumsy about it? How can someone be sneaky enough to poison a child and stupid enough to get the dose wrong? It should take barely a teaspoon of the stuff to kill someone so little.”

     Ed looked around the room as if expecting to be congratulated on his logic, but instead he got glares from half the room letting him know he had said something very, very stupid. Martha knew the feeling. She was trying to come up with a response, a defense for her suspicions. She had no doubt that there was a poisoner, but she didn’t know what she could add to her original case. She had put everything worth saying into that first explanation, and they had acted like it was nothing. In fact, the one clue that made the case really compelling, the watcher, had been assumed to be a hallucination. They had never even considered supposing him to be real.

     “I think,” said Joan. “That we’re the ones who would harm a little boy. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it Martha?” She paused, looking the mother straight in the eye with the same sickly compassion as everyone else. “You think he was poisoned at the New Year’s Eve party, which makes us the prime suspects.”

     Finally, her friends let their concern slip for a moment to show the surprise and incredulity with which they had been regarding her all along. For her part, Martha simply nodded and then weakly added, “They do say when a child’s hurt or taken it’s almost always by someone they know.”

     She had thought that would do something. Maybe the villain would do something stupid, or people would start telling her why it couldn’t be them. The situation would change, new information would be added, and she might get closer to the truth. Instead, an uneasy silence swallowed the room, which no one seemed brave enough to break.

     After several seconds of emptiness, Martha got up and said that she needed to use the bathroom. Perhaps afraid of having to defend his wife’s behavior, Evan similarly excused himself by saying that he should go check on Connor. As soon as she closed the door, Martha’s whole body started to shake with frustration. Her hands knotted themselves into eager fists as she struggle to suppress an angry shriek. Then her lung started to rebel, and the woman made again for her inhaler. As the minor fit passed, she sat down on the toilet seat—the lid was down, of course—and tried to figure out what to do.

     It was becoming increasingly obvious that she wasn’t going to catch the culprit here. She had been looking the whole time for some hint in her guests, but even after everything that had been said there was still nothing to make the answer any clearer. She had thought that this was like some puzzle or game in which she just needed to find the right question to trick the poisoner out of hiding, but she should have known that life didn’t work like that. She knew who had spoken and who hadn’t, but the poisoner might just as easily keep quiet to avoid giving clues as speak up to discredit her. She had noted the expressions of surprise and fear, but surprise and fear are entirely normal when one is told that a friend believes there’s a villain about. Her trap had been poorly laid from the very start. But as long as the poisoner was loose her son was in danger. The only solution was to give up for now, watch diligently, and thwart the enemy in the midst of their scheme. It was dangerous, but it was also the only strategy that could work.

     As quickly as she could manage, and with an unpleasant sense of defeat, Martha went back out to tell her friends she was sorry. She told them that after listening to them she now realized how silly she had been, and that she was embarrassed and ashamed at having accused them all so horribly. Finally, after everyone said just how all right it was, she let her guests know she was going back to the bedroom to work through everything. She left with one final note of frustration as she failed to spot any hint of triumph in the faces of the suspects.

     Finally, the young mother lay down in her bed. She knew there was nothing more she could do in that moment, and she tried to put the issue out of her mind as she listened to her husband and her friends in the living room. They probably wanted to leave, but they also wanted to process what had just happened, and so they hung around for another hour or so chatting quietly. Exhaustion and curiosity were struggling for dominance in Martha as she listened in to the conversations. In fact, she was on the verge of sleep when Claire quietly pushed open the door and went over to her.

     “I’m sorry about Connor,” said Claire in a barely audible whisper. “It was never about hurting him, only about scaring you.”

     The woman strode further into the room until she was looking straight down at Martha, whose eyes widened madly.

     “I really thought you would be more careful with all that paranoia, but it was actually really easy to grab your inhaler while you were setting up. I wouldn’t hope for any leftovers for evidence, though, this particular substance dissipates fairly quickly. It was the main reason I needed you so worked up; I needed to make sure it didn’t vanish before you took enough to be lethal. Oh, that’ll be paralysis you’re experiencing right now, by the way,” said Claire with a note of smugness. “The heart attack will be coming up shortly. Not surprising considering what everyone just heard, and also given your medical history. It’s surprising how very unhealthy guilt can be.” She leaned down so that she was whispering directly into Martha’s ear. “I know what you did all those years ago, before you ever knew my name. You were right to expect an enemy.”