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figured out. Leona had spent her childhood watching her father weigh and measure and mix chemical compounds at the back of his pharmacy. She had learned a great deal about certain mixtures and doses and how they worked. When Leona was ten, Mrs. Crowe, a widow who lived across the street, was arrested for murder. It turned out she had fed arsenic-laced Jell-O to her mother-in-law, who was in the hospital suffering the effects of a heart attack. Within a few days, four bodies had been exhumed. Mrs. Crowe had murdered her husband, her father-in-law and her own parents with arsenic. She’d gotten away with it all those years because the symptoms were identical to those of a heart attack. Besides, Mrs. Crowe was a good woman, a Christian lady to the core. No one had ever suspected her. No one thought to look for arsenic.

    Mrs. Crowe had chosen it for several reasons. The first was its accessibility, since she had purchased it two blocks from her home, from Leona’s father. At the time the town was installing new sewer lines. Half the population had been in to buy rat poison from her father. Of course, he kept records of all potentially lethal purchases. He showed the police that he had noted that Mrs. Crowe, like everyone else, had reported an acute problem with displaced rodents nesting under porches and eaves.

    Mrs. Crowe had been the high school home economics teacher. She taught Sunday school as well. Leona had often spent the night with her daughters. The event traumatized her. Leona liked Mrs. Crowe. Mrs. Crowe had read them The Velveteen Rabbit and made them cry with happiness as they fell asleep. Beyond that, Mrs. Crowe had taken Leona and her girls to see the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Memphis one Sunday afternoon in October. The girls had talked about the event for weeks in advance because Mr. Crowe had ordered a new Cadillac and the celestial carriage was promised to arrive just in time to transport them to the event. However, on the day in question, Mr. Crowe was in bed with a stomach virus, so his wife, Tilly, drove them instead.

    A week later Mr. Crowe was dead.

    It gave Leona nightmares. While they were having their grand adventure, Mr. Crowe was dying. It was too horrible. They could have stopped it then. Mrs. Crowe knew it. She knew it and she drove on up the road, singing silly songs with them.

    For months after they arrested Tilly Crowe, Leona hounded her mother and father with questions about every detail. Her mother always deflected her questions because she feared the grim nature of some of the answers would only add to her child’s unhealthy obsession. However, her father took what he considered a more enlightened approach.

    He answered each question in vivid, if nonsensational, detail. He explained the cumulative effect of certain poisons like arsenic. He showed her how Mrs. Crowe had carefully measured and scheduled each dose, explaining how incremental amounts digested atintervals would manifest increasingly severe symptoms. Yet each set of symptoms was familiar and attributed to nonthreatening natural causes. Each of her victims had shown a gradual decline that began with an upset stomach. By spacing out the doses, Mrs. Crowe was able to give each victim a false sense of security, as the symptoms would actually diminish for a while.

    Almost no one sees a doctor for gas pains and diarrhea. By the time their symptoms had progressed to chest pains, the poor souls evidenced other classic indications of a heart attack. No doctor sees an apparent heart attack in progress as a potential poisoning—unless, of course, the patient suspects as much and informs his physician. All of Mrs. Crowe’s victims were well into middle age. None of them suspected poison. Though Mr. Crowe’s mother had vehemently asked for an autopsy, which her grief-stricken daughter-in-law overruled so as not to torment his distraught children any further. The old lady acquiesced with apologies and held her