The lawyer who unscrewed the lid of that pill bottle was named Harlan Beck, a stooped man of eighty one with white eyebrows like tufts of cotton and a bow tie he had worn since the Eisenhower years. He sniffed the tea once, then again, and his face changed in a way I will never forget. He set the bottle carefully on his blotter, as if it might break, and looked at me over his glasses. “Mrs. Whitaker,” he said, “I have been practicing law in Boise for fifty four years, and I know exactly what that smells like.”
He told me to wait, and he made two telephone calls. The first was to a woman at the Ada County Adult Protective Services, whom he addressed by her first name and spoke to in clipped, urgent phrases. The second was to a retired detective named Frank Moreno, who now ran a small private laboratory out of his garage, and who agreed to meet us in twenty minutes. Harlan Beck put on his overcoat, took my arm, and walked me down the steps of his building like a man escorting a duchess to a ball.
Frank Moreno tested the tea in a little glass vial with a handful of drops from a bottle. He did not say anything for a long time. Then he wrote a single word on a yellow pad and turned it around so that I could read it. Lorazepam. A strong sedative, he explained, the kind prescribed for anxiety. Crushed fine and dissolved in a hot, bitter drink, it would make anyone forgetful and dazed. In a woman of my age, doubled, it could slow the heart and cloud the mind for hours. It was precisely what a clever person would use to make an old woman look senile.
I sat very still. I thought of the violet. I thought of how I had cried that morning when I saw its leaves turn black, thinking that I was the one who had failed it. I thought of Gene, who gave it to me at our fiftieth anniversary dinner, in a pot wrapped with a gold ribbon, and said, Here is something to keep alive. He would be heartbroken, I thought, to see what had been done to me. And then, to my surprise, I thought, no, he would be angry. And so, at last, was I.
Anger, when it finally comes to a gentle person, does not shout. It simply rolls up its sleeves and gets to work.
Harlan Beck had been, as it turned out, the lawyer of my late husband for thirty years. He had drawn up our wills. He had read the clause that Gene insisted on adding, that no guardianship of my person or my estate could be requested without a medical evaluation by a doctor of my own choosing. Travis, my son, had never known about it. Brittany had certainly never read it. The papers she had planned to have signed on Friday were therefore useless on their face. But Harlan said he wanted more than a technicality. He wanted the truth.
He asked me to go home. I protested, but he held up his hand and said that if I disappeared, Brittany would know she had been discovered. He wanted me to behave as if nothing had changed, and to drink nothing she brought me, and to wear a small recording device that Frank Moreno would supply. I thought of my great grandmother, who crossed the Oregon Trail at fourteen. I told him I would go home and be the most confused woman in Idaho. Harlan Beck laughed out loud, a high wheeze, and said, “Mrs. Whitaker, I believe you.”
I wore the device for two days. I dropped my keys in the kitchen. I asked Brittany twice what day it was. I forgot the name of my own church. And on Thursday night, at nine o clock, she brought the tea and set it down with a smile. “Double strength tonight, Mom,” she said, and I thought my heart would stop. “You have a big day tomorrow. The judge will be so happy you are being cooperative.” I smiled and thanked her. When she left, I held the recorder to my heart and whispered, “Got it.”
On Friday morning, at the Ada County courthouse, Travis sat at the petitioner table with his wife on one side and a young lawyer in a shiny suit on the other. I was brought into the room in a wheelchair, my idea, with a blanket on my lap and my hair undone. Judge Ramirez, a tall, silver haired woman, looked at me for a long moment. Then she looked at Harlan Beck, who had risen at the back of the room with a little black box in his hand. “Your Honor,” he said, “before we proceed, I believe the court should hear something.”
They played the recording. the voice of Brittany filled the quiet room, clear as church bells. Double it tomorrow. She will never taste it under the herb. I watched the face of my son. He went white, then gray, then something I had never seen in him before, a terrible stillness. He turned slowly to look at his wife. She had risen from her chair with her mouth open. For one long second no one moved. Then Detective Moreno stood up from the back row, and two deputies came forward, and Brittany began to scream.
Travis did not speak until the courtroom was empty. He sat at the table with his hands flat on the wood, staring at the grain. When I rolled my wheelchair to his side and stood up out of it, he made a sound I had not heard since he was a boy. He fell to his knees and put his arms around my waist. “Mama,” he said. “I believed her. I let her tell me you were failing. I let her tell me everything.” I stroked his hair. I told him that a good man can be fooled by a clever liar, and that it takes courage to admit it.
Brittany pled guilty in the spring. Travis filed for divorce and moved into a small apartment, and I went back to my own house, which he had nearly sold from under me. Harlan Beck, who is eighty two now, comes on Sundays for pot roast. On my birthday, he arrived with a wrapped box tied in a gold ribbon. Inside, in a clay pot, was a new African violet, tiny and perfect, its leaves the color of velvet. I set it on the windowsill, where the morning sun comes in. It has bloomed twice since. I water it with plain water.