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Chapter Fourteen
The Tucker House
6:40 PM
“Laudanum is extraordinarily bitter to the taste,” Tom said. They had all reconvened in
Mrs. Tucker’s parlor to once again confer, this time on the findings of the afternoon. Exhaustion was
etched on the face of every person seated in the circle and they had all promised each other that they
would tumble into their beds early tonight.
“Bitter in the same way that residue from the suicide tree might be?” Trevor asked.
“Having never sampled Cerbera Odollam, I could not draw such a comparison,” Tom
answered, before cheerfully adding, “Oh dear, I seem to have made a slip. All right then, I’ll confess
to an occasional dose of laudanum. I doubt anyone makes it through medical school without sampling
the wares now and then.”
“Tom,” Geraldine said disapprovingly. “They say it is most addictive.”
“And they are quite right,” Tom admitted. “Whoever ‘they’ may be. I’ve always
wondered about this nameless group of people, this gang of ‘theys’ who always seem to be so certain
about what others should do.” He turned back to Trevor. “But if you are suggesting that someone
might willingly swallow Cerbera Odollam, believing it to be their normal dose of prescribed
laudanum, I suppose that it is possible. Both are bitter to the taste, yes, and laudanum has a reddish
brown color, not that different from the dark shade the kernels of the Cerbera Odollam turn after
exposure to air.”
“All right then, let us follow this thread of assumption and see where it leads,” Trevor
said. “What if the poison was not administered through a highly spiced food like a curry, but rather
through the medication of Rose Weaver?”
“You sound quite sure of yourself,” Emma said.
“Do not let him fool you with his Socratic question,” Rayley said with a smile. “Trevor
and I know for a fact that Rose Weaver took laudanum every morning because her son Michael told us
so. Confessed it to us as we all stood in Jonathan Benson’s rented room along with a good deal of
claptrap about his mother being ill and finding her little songbird dead.”
“Songbird?” Davy repeated.
“Yes, for you were quite right, lad,” Rayley said. “The little yellow bird we found in the
Weaver house once had a little yellow friend. Strange to think how random life and death can be. A
hand reaches into a wicker cage and one creature lives while the other dies.”
“Do you think Rose’s use of laudanum was well known among the Weaver’s
contemporaries and servants?” Emma asked. “Widely enough that anyone would consider it a likely
vehicle for poison?”
“Rose was a habitual user of opium even back when I knew her in the fifties,” Geraldine
said matter-of-factly. “She would walk out of a room in a most agitated manner and walk back in a
few minutes later with an utterly serene demeanor. Most likely everyone knew.”
“Good heavens, Geraldine,” Trevor said in exasperation. “Might you have mentioned
this earlier?”
“How was I to know it was relevant, darling?” Geraldine asked, flicking some sort of
crawling bug from her arm as she spoke, and then fanning herself with vigor. The sun was sinking but