Her previous editor, Linda Lucerne, had loved Lord Harold almost as much as she did. Linda never changed much more than a punctuation mark; Kitty used industrial strength black markers to X through pages of manuscript at a time. Pages that had taken hours of research, planning, writing, and rewriting before they were ever mailed to Shoehorn, Dunstreet and Matthews (known affectionately as SDM), the esteemed publishers of the Lord Harold Wiggins series.
Yes, Linda Lucerne had loved Harriet’s style, and said so from the moment she accepted the first novel, Lord Wiggins Makes Hay While the Sun Shines. And make hay he did. Linda’s faith was proved justified, and the success of Makes Hay was repeated in Lord Wiggins Beards the Lion in His Den and the next seven Lord Harold Wiggins books. Alas, Linda had suffered a heart attack just after the tenth book, Lord Wiggins Throws Pearls Before Swine, had been mailed off to SDM. Upon her recovery, she had opted for retirement from the publishing industry.
Harriet tried hard to remember a sin she might have committed that would have justified so mean a punishment as having Kitty Craig become her new editor.
She had known other writers who had suffered under Kitty’s abuses. Upon learning that Kitty would be her editor, Harriet had complained long and loud to her agent. But Wendall had pointed out that Kitty had been personally chosen for Harriet by Mr. William Shoehorn III. He had also mentioned that unless she was willing to come up with a new main character, they had no hope of moving to another publishing house. SDM owned Lord Harold. Wendall urged her to be open-minded.
Harriet loved Lord Wiggins too much to forsake him, and so she had tried to follow Wendall’s advice. Tried, that is, until she received her first editorial letter from Kitty Craig. A long list of changes were demanded, each demand phrased in abusive language. The one that bothered Harriet the most was the demand to change the ending:
“How absolutely boring! Monroe dies when he swallows lemonade laced with strychnine. Strychnine! That old saw? Is your imagination so limited? Formula writer though you are, I would hope you could come up with something a tad more original.”
Old saw indeed! Strychnine was a classic poison, she lamented, famous throughout detective fiction. But Kitty would hear none of it.
Harriet decided to be big about it; after all, she didn’t want a reputation as the sort of writer who simply couldn’t let go of a word she’d written. She was no rank amateur. She could bear the burden of criticism; being showered with the unwanted opinions of others was inevitable in her profession. And so she set herself to the painful task of revising the ending of Pearls Before Swine. That in turn meant that she had to revise a number of passages in the story, but she did not complain.
In fact, by the time she mailed off her new version, she was quite pleased with it. This time, Lord Wiggins offered Monroe a piece of chocolate cake chock-full of Catapres. It had been a bit tricky for dear Harry to obtain the drug, but she had managed it. Monroe had suffered heart failure thirty minutes after eating his dessert, allowing Lord Harold all the time in the world to leave the scene. It was certainly not as popular in fiction as strychnine, so Harriet thought Kitty might be contented.
Kitty hated it.
“You are going to have to do better than this. Catapres? Could you possibly devise anything more obscure? No reader is going to recognize this as a poison. Crimeny, it sounds like a resort that would appeal to people from the Bronx.”
Not being from New York, Harriet couldn’t guess what Kitty meant by her last remark. She steamed and stewed for a while and then went back to work. Now it was a challenge.
In version three, Lord Harold arranged for Monroe to be bitten repeatedly by a Gila monster.
“What utter nonsense!” Kitty wrote. “How the heck does an English lord happen to have a twenty-inch Arizona desert lizard hanging about?”
Even Harriet had to admit that the Gila monster wasn’t her best effort. She spent a little more time on version four. There might not be many Gila monsters roaming about the English countryside, but she knew that rhododendrons weren’t so rare. And so it was that Lord Harold made tea from the deadly leaves, and served it with scones to the unsuspecting Monroe.
“Harriet, please. You are trying my patience. This is so unimaginative. If you want this to sell anywhere outside of the East Lansing Lawn and Garden Club, rewrite.”
Harriet wasn’t even sure how she found the nerve to try a fifth time. She needed to publish annually to maintain the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed, and Kitty’s demands were delaying the publication date of Pearls Before Swine. She had arranged to attend the annual Mystery World Awards Banquet, the Whodundunits. Her flight from Los Angeles to New York was booked, the hotel arrangements made. But now she wasn’t sure she could face the inquires of her fellow authors; they were bound to notice that the next Lord Harold Wiggins book had not arrived on schedule.
She had grown more bitter about this trial by rewrite as each day passed. But once more she devised an ending, this time with antimony, arranging elaborate plot devices to allow Lord Harold Wiggins access to an industrial poison. And still Kitty wasn’t satisfied.
As she held Kitty’s fifth nasty letter, something snapped inside Harriet. She began to see Kitty as the root of all evil in her life. Before Kitty, she had been happy. Nothing much had disturbed the world dear Harry had shared with her; he had paid her way, she had kept him alive. It seemed to Harriet that Kitty wanted to kill them both. Well, Harriet decided, we’ll see who kills whom.
The idea began to comfort her. She would attend the Whodundunits, slip a little something into Kitty’s wine and sit back and enjoy her evening, knowing that her troubles would soon be over. In a room full of people who were constantly dreaming up ways for other people to die, the death of a woman who was almost universally despised by them would present a monumental problem for New York ’s Finest.
Harriet became quite delighted at the prospect. She did not doubt that she would be able to kill. After all, she had already murdered over thirty characters. (Three was Harriet’s lucky number, and so she made it the average body count in her books.) Among those thirty characters were a great many individuals she liked better than Kitty Craig.
For her first real life murder, she would need something special. For weeks, she consulted her reference works on poison. She searched the pages of A Panorama of Poisonous Plants, Powders, and Potions. She studied the listings in Lyle’s Lethal Liquids, even considered Conroy’s Compendium of Caustics. But her most promising candidates were found in Everyday Toxic Substances: Our Dangerous Friends.
She made a long list of factors to consider. Reaction time. What would dear Harry say? Quick, she decided. Very quick and highly toxic. Kitty in prolonged, relentless pain was a tempting picture, but she concluded that having Ms. Craig dead before the salads were served was preferable; attention-getting though agonizing death throes are, it might put a bit of a damper on the evening’s festivities.
The poison would need to be something that could be transported easily; if discovered among her belongings, it could not seem out of place. Her final prerequisite was that it be something she could obtain without raising suspicions.
After hours of concentrated effort, she finally had the means in hand and the logistics of delivering it well planned.
She hummed a happy little tune as she latched her suitcase closed and carried it to the front door. She sat in the entry, lovingly caressing the corners of her carry-on bag. Harriet was far too careful to have her plans spoiled by the possibility of lost luggage. She could hardly contain her excitement when the taxicab pulled up in her driveway and tooted its horn.