36 THE THIRD GRAVE

36

THE THIRD GRAVE

In the library, Vida puts Mozart's piano concerto K. 488 on the turntable and sets the volume slightly higher than usual, using the glorious music to mask the noise of Deacon thrashing and gasping in the kitchen. The sheriff is a tall, muscular man capable of making a lot of noise in his death throes.

Western monkshood, also called "wolfsbane," has a toxicity equal to that of any lethal plant. The roots and leaves are especially poisonous. That morning, she had gathered it from the upland meadow where, on Tuesday, she had filled bags with her favorite mushroom, Morchella conica . Nature provides weaponry as readily as sustenance.

Aconitine and aconine are the poisons in monkshood. Because those substances can be absorbed through the skin with lethal effect, Vida wore nitrile gloves and a face shield while crushing and then steeping the plants. Filtered through muslin, the resultant clear liquid would have provided swift justice to Sheriff Deacon. However, to increase potency, Vida had boiled and reduced the brew to a thin syrup, concentrating the unwholesome chemicals.

A fully satisfying reaction to monkshood can take from just ten minutes to a few hours. It has been Vida's intention to ensure her unwanted suitor will succumb in a timely manner, both as a matter of mercy and in the interest of getting on with the work ahead of her.

The deep, white bowls had been stacked one atop the other, and the bottom bowl had contained an inch of the reduction. Even if the sheriff had come to the cooktop as she had separated the bowls, he probably wouldn't have noticed the puddle of clear liquid in one of them before Vida ladled lentils into it. Besides, his suspicions were allayed when she'd drunk the wine he'd switched with hers, and there was nothing alarming about being served soup out of the same pot from which she took hers.

His vision will cloud and grow dim. Creeping paralysis of the respiratory system, declining blood pressure, and a faltering pulse will leave him weak. As his body temperature falls, he will feel as if his veins carry ice water rather than blood, and he will begin to shudder uncontrollably. Paralysis of the heart muscle will be the ultimate cause of death.

Eighteen years earlier, the seer with raven hair said, You'll be a champion of the natural world and all its beauty. If indeed that's what Vida is becoming, it seems that she will be required to do hard things. Perhaps that should be no surprise. Nature herself is as hard as she is beautiful, red of tooth and claw.

Vida waits fifteen minutes before returning to the kitchen. Nash Deacon is dead—and something of a mess.

She rolls him facedown and with some effort pulls off his sport coat to search its pockets.

On that afternoon eight months ago, intending murder, Belden Bead hadn't carried his phone, for its transponder could produce evidence putting him at the scene of the crime. Nash Deacon has not been quite that circumspect, although the phone Vida retrieves from an interior pocket of his coat is evidently not the one connected to him by a telecom account, but instead a cheap disposable for special occasions. He surely didn't purchase it with a credit card or from any vendor who might know him. Therefore, no one will be tracking its signal to search for Sheriff Deacon when he goes missing. She will nevertheless smash the phone with a hammer before burying it with the lawless lawman.

She rolls up the corpse in a drop cloth and seals that shroud with duct tape. She cleans up what mess remains.

The sky darkles from blue to purple to black, and the stars are born again as they have been every night for billions of years, and the moon rises as it has risen for somewhat fewer billions of years, and for the second night in eight months, the insistent growl of the backhoe carries across the meadow and fades into the sound-baffling forest.

During the hours of labor, as Vida operates the machine from the elevated driver's seat, mosquitoes forage through the darkness for blood, but not one lands on her exposed skin; in all her years, none of their kind has bitten her. Neither do night moths flutter about her, nor do the day flies annoy her. She has never been stung by a bee or nipped by a spider. There comes a moment when a ghostly presence appears beyond the certain identification that the lights of the backhoe might have provided, a pale and fluid form low to the ground, like a humbled spirit that must crawl the territory it is condemned to haunt. Vida believes this is Azrael, the albino cougar that appeared in a bolder fashion on the day when Anna Lagare, the mortician's daughter, came to visit. If the big cat is here as an omen of a death to come, it doesn't linger to impress Vida with its dire message, and she fears neither Azrael nor what its apparition is said to foretell. She watches it deliquesce into the dark, and she continues digging a grave for the man and his Trans Am. Later, when she's in the pit, hoisting soil out with the long, jointed arm of the backhoe, she considers the placer mine, where over centuries Nature has deposited beauty and treasure. In this hastily stocked placer mine of Vida's creation, nothing lovely or of value waits to be found, but if eighteen years ago the seer was right about her purpose and destiny, this too is an essential work of Nature.