“Keith,” Tom finished, and his voice broke in the middle of the name. “The husband of Darla. Keith.” For a moment, the whole hospital corridor seemed to hold its breath. On the tiny screen of my phone, at 11:52 at night, a heavyset man in a flannel jacket and a feed store cap had opened the freezer in the kitchen of Hazel, lifted the carton of butter pecan, and set it on the counter as neatly as if it were a pie. Then he drew a small brown bottle from his pocket, unscrewed the cap, and stirred something into the ice cream with a plastic spoon, humming a tune I did not recognize.
Detective Larson watched without moving a muscle. When the video ended, he looked at Darla, who had sunk onto a waiting room chair with her mouth open. “Mrs. Pruitt,” he said, “where is your husband tonight?” She did not answer. He looked at the little white cooler bag on her arm. “Would you mind if I looked inside?” Darla clutched the bag against her chest. Then, with a sob, she let go of it, and the detective unzipped it on the table. Inside, on a bed of ice, was a fresh carton of butter pecan, sealed, the exact same brand I always bought.
The explanation came out of her in pieces, between sobs, while Tom stood against the wall with a face of stone. The old will of Hazel, written in 1998, left the farmhouse to her daughter, Ruth, who was the mother of Darla. The new will, signed in September, left it to Tom. Darla and Keith had spent a year trying to find a way to undo it. They could not prove Hazel was confused. They could not prove I was manipulating her. So they decided to give the court a reason to throw the new will out. If Hazel were poisoned, and I were the one who brought her the ice cream, the new will would be tainted forever.
A woman who has eaten the same ice cream for twelve years knows exactly what it should taste like.
The plan had been to swap the carton in the freezer for the poisoned one after Hazel went to bed and then bring in the clean one to the police as proof. Keith had never meant to kill her, Darla said, between hiccups. The dose was supposed to be small, enough to make her ill, enough to point the finger. He had looked it up on his phone. He had not understood the difference between a dose for a young man and a dose for a woman of ninety four. “It was only meant to scare her,” Darla whispered. “It was only meant to scare everybody.”
Detective Larson went to the home of Keith in Merrill that same night. He found him in the garage, seated on an upturned bucket, with the little brown bottle on the workbench and his head in his hands. He had heard the news from his mother in law by telephone, he told the detective, and he knew that it was over. He did not resist. He asked, in a thin voice, whether the old lady was going to be all right. The detective said that was the first intelligent question he had asked in a year.
Hazel survived. The doctors said it was her constitution, and she said it was the Lutheran church. She spent twelve days in the hospital and came out thinner, but with her bright blue eyes as sharp as ever. When I visited her on the thirteenth day, with a book of crossword puzzles and a bag of oranges, she took my hand and patted it. “Jenny,” she said, “I always knew it was not you. I told the nurse, that girl would sooner cut off her own arm than hurt a hair of my head.” I laughed and wept at the same time.
Keith pleaded guilty to attempted murder and fraud, and the judge sentenced him to nine years. Darla received five for conspiracy. The will of Hazel was upheld in a single hearing, in a small courtroom in Wausau, with the old woman herself in the front row in her best navy dress and a hat with a feather. The judge asked her whether she understood the document she had signed. “Your Honor,” she said, “I understand it better than you do. I wrote the damn thing.” The courtroom roared. Even the bailiff turned his face to the wall.
Ruth, the mother of Darla, came to see Hazel the next week, alone, with a pie in her hands. She stood in the doorway of the farmhouse, a gray woman of seventy two in a plain coat, and she said she had come to apologize for her daughter. Hazel looked at her for a long time. “Ruthie,” she said at last, “you were always the weakest of my girls. Come in and have a cup of coffee.” They sat at the kitchen table until dusk. When Ruth left, she was crying, but it looked like the kind of crying that does some good.
Tom and I moved to the farm in the spring. Hazel insisted. She said a house needs people in it, and she was tired of talking to the radio. We took the east bedroom and gave her the downstairs one, with the window facing the garden. I put a new freezer in the pantry, a white chest model with a lock, and Tom disconnected the camera, wound up the cord, and put it in a drawer. Hazel asked him to put it back. She said she had grown fond of the spy.
Every Sunday evening now, I still bring her a carton of butter pecan ice cream. I buy it at the same grocery store, from the same freezer, in the same brand. We eat it together on the back porch with two spoons, watching the fireflies come up out of the field. “Jenny,” she said last week, scraping the bottom of the carton, “do you know what I like best about this ice cream?” I said I did not. She smiled her small, sly smile. “It tastes like pecans,” she said. “Not pennies.”
