The second file opened on a plain white wall, with Robert sitting in front of it in the gray cardigan that I had given him for our tenth anniversary. He cleared his throat and gave the camera the half smile that had won me over, in the break room of the hospital, twelve years before. “Karen,” he said. “My dear. If you are watching this, it means that I was right, and Brittany has been caught. I am sorry that you have to see it this way. I would have given anything to spare you.”
“I want to tell you what I know,” Robert said, “in the order I learned it. First, in November, I began to lose feeling in my fingers. You noticed. You said it looked like neuropathy, and I agreed. Second, in December, I developed a pattern of symptoms that matched, almost exactly, a case that I once testified on, in 1998. A metal compound, given in small repeated doses. I told no one, because I could not imagine it. In January, I ran my own hair and blood in the lab at night. The results came back on the twenty eighth. I sat in the dark for an hour, Karen. I still did not want to believe it.”
He drew a long breath. “Then I found the white powder in her purse. That evening I put it under the microscope and ran the spectrum. It was the same. I took it to my friend, Detective Harold Pace, and asked him to hold it. I did not want to put her in prison. I wanted, God forgive me, to give her a chance to stop.” He looked off to the side, and for a moment, I watched the father come apart. “But she did not. And then she did something worse, Karen. She ordered a second compound, from a compounding pharmacy in Cincinnati, in your name. With your nursing license number. She wanted it to look as though you had done it.”
A thumb drive left with a lawyer held a second forty minute video that told a nurse who had really been poisoning her husband.
I stopped the video. I sat there with my hand over my mouth. The silence in the office of Mr. Collins was so complete that I could hear the ticking of the clock in the hall. All of the time that I had spent that winter feeding Robert soup and rubbing his hands, taking the night shifts when he slept, rationing my own tears so that he would not see them, and all along, in the glove box of a white car in the driveway, there had been a receipt for a poison with my name on it.
When I started the video again, he had reached the end. His voice was softer. “Karen, I have made some arrangements. Detective Pace has the powder, the receipt, and my blood work. Mr. Collins has a letter that protects you. If I should die before this is finished, the police will already know where to look. I wanted to see her stopped, and I wanted you safe, and I could not do both while I lived.” He smiled, very faintly. “I have loved you every day of these twelve years. You were a better wife than I deserved, and the finest nurse I ever knew. Please do not be afraid. The truth is on your side.”
The door of the office opened. Detective Pace, a tall, gray haired man in a tweed jacket, stood there with two uniformed officers. Behind him, in the hall, I saw Brittany being led away, her wrists in handcuffs, her blond hair loose over her shoulders. Jake was sitting on a bench by the window with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. Brittany twisted around as they took her past the open door. Our eyes met. I had expected hatred. What I saw, instead, was something stranger and sadder, the face of a child who has broken a thing she cannot fix. Then the elevator doors closed.
The trial in Fayette County lasted three weeks. Brittany was convicted of murder and of identity theft, and the judge, a gray woman with a calm face, sentenced her to life with the possibility of parole after twenty five years. When it was read, I did not feel victorious. I felt only that I was holding a very heavy stone, and that I would have to carry it for the rest of my days.
Jake came to see me afterward. He stood on my front porch in the October rain, holding a bunch of grocery store chrysanthemums, and he told me that he had known something was wrong for months, and had told himself it was nerves. I said that I understood. He said that he would never forgive himself. I told him that the world was full of people who looked away from things they could not bear to see, and that the ones who came to the door, afterward, with flowers, were the better kind.
I went back to nursing in the spring. I had thought I never would. But I missed it, the quiet night halls, the small sounds, the patient who wants someone to hold a hand. I took a position on the oncology floor of the same hospital where Robert had worked, and on my first shift, a young resident, a woman with a nose ring and a stethoscope, stopped me at the nurses station and said, “Mrs. Whitfield, Dr. Whitfield taught my toxicology course. He was the best teacher I ever had.” I held on to the counter. “Thank you,” I said. “He would have been pleased.”
With the life insurance, I set up a scholarship at the University of Kentucky, in the name of Robert, for students of toxicology and forensic pathology. The first recipient was a young man from Pikeville named Darnell, the son of a coal miner, who wanted to find out why so many of his neighbors were getting sick. At the ceremony, he shook my hand and said that he planned to dedicate his career to finding the truth in places where nobody wanted to look.
On the anniversary of his death, I took the thumb drive from my desk drawer and played the first minute of the second video. Not the evidence, not the poison, only the part at the beginning, where he smiles and says, “Karen, my dear.” I watched his face, the half smile, the thin gray hair. I said to the screen, “I am all right, Robert.” And the strangest thing happened. The clock on the mantel struck, a single note, and a cardinal landed on the sill outside the window and looked in at me for a long, quiet moment before it flew away.
