Read Pick Your Poison for Free Online Page A

Seems Ben had been the chief suspect in the death of his wife. She’d died at home fifteen years ago, after swallowing a cold medicine laced with cyanide. Was it coincidence husband and wife died from the same poison? I didn’t think so, and I had no doubt Sergeant Kline would agree with me—if he had an agreeable bone in his body.
    The Shade police had taken Ben into custody right after Cloris’s death, but he’d been released the same day. Seems no direct evidence connected him to her murder. He was questioned several times in the months that followed, and from what I could discern from the brief reports I’d read, he was their only suspect, his apparent motive being a large insurance policy taken out on Cloris the year before.
    But even though I’d learned where Ben lived before working for us and heard about his troubled past, I still had no idea if he left any family behind. But I intended to meet them and offer them any help they might require if, in fact, they existed. As I drove deeper into rural America, I thoroughly convinced myself I was doing what Daddy would have done by paying my respects to an employee’s family. You’d have thought I’d never heard a word about the road to hell.

    An hour later I sat across from Sheriff Stanley Nemec, his battered wormwood desk between us. The ceiling fan churned above, crying out for WD-40 every few seconds. A chaw of tobacco bulged in the man’s left cheek, and his gray-streaked mustache gave way to a quarter-inch stubble on his cheeks and chin.
    After pressing his tobacco lower between his cheek and gum with a fat finger, Nemec said, “Died a complicated death, Mrs. Cloris Grayson did. Someone went to plenty of trouble.”
    “And you’re certain Ben killed her?” I said.
    “A lead-pipe cinch. He had plenty of time and plenty of reason to do the deed. What chaps my hide is that if you’re persuaded to kill someone, you shoot ’em and get it over with. Nail them in the back, if you can’t look ’em in the eye. Only a coward slips poison in stuff that’s supposed to make you feel better.”
    “Could she have committed suicide?” I asked.
    “I considered the possibility and rejected the notion ten seconds later. Why go to all the trouble of taking cold capsules apart and packing them with cyanide? Hell, she coulda just swallowed the stuff.” Nemec leaned forward and spit in the paper cup he held.
    “I see your point. But could anyone besides Ben have tampered with the medicine?”
    “I suppose, but no one had a motive ’cept for him. Course, he had himself a convenient alibi. Doing carpenter work up on Ridge Road in front of six men the day she died. But I always said he coulda snuck that poison in anytime.”
    “There was no real proof he murdered her, though?”
    “No signed confession. No fingerprints on the medicine bottle. No cyanide in the shed. None of that. So, much as I tried, I couldn’t pin anything on him.”
    “But you still think he killed her?”
    “Sure as hell’s hot.”
    “Did Ben have any relatives besides Cloris?”
    “They had no kids, and he had no other kin I know about, but he remarried not long ago. Local widow named Ruth Sawyer. Fine person, too. What she saw in him is the real mystery here.”
    “He had a wife?”
    “Yeah. They was newlyweds .” He said this last word with undisguised contempt.
    “You disliked Ben?” I said, thinking it odd that a newly married man would work so far from home. Had he come back here on his days off?
    “Disliked Ben?” the sheriff was saying. “Nah, I hated him. Made his life hell after he murdered Cloris. Figured if I couldn’t stick him in jail, I’d make him feel like a cell might not be such a bad idea. Better than livin’ with me hounding him day and night. To this very day, I don’t understand why he stayed in this town.”
    “Did he ever offer an explanation?”
    Nemec nodded and spit again. “Oh, sure. Told me every chance he got how he’d never leave until he