Lucy shook her head.
“This is a bad idea.”
“Do you have a better one?”
Her friend remained silent.
There was no better idea.
The plan was simple: Sophia was to ask her husband for the keys to his mother’s apartment, claiming that Eleanor had promised her a recipe from an old cookbook.
While her mother-in-law was at the weekly meeting of the opera lovers’ club, she and Lucy went into the apartment to check the storage unit.
It sounded like a plot from a bad crime novel, but Sophia couldn’t think of anything better.
Alex gave her the keys without asking too many questions. He was too busy with his project to go into detail.
“Just make sure you don’t leave a mess behind. Mom won’t like it,” he said.
Sophia promised.
On Thursday evening, as Eleanor was leaving for the opera, two friends were standing at the door of her apartment.
“Ready?” Lucy whispered.
Sophia nodded and put the key in the lock.
Her mother-in-law’s apartment was exactly as she remembered it: spotless, beautifully decorated, and cold.
Everything was in its place, and every object seemed to say, “Don’t touch me.”
“Where is the storage unit?” Lucy asked.
“The door is in the kitchen. There are stairs down there.”
They walked down the corridor, trying not to make a sound, even though the apartment was empty.
Sophia found the door to the storage room – old wood with a heavy lock.
“Damn, it’s locked. Do you have a key? Alex only gave me the front door key.”
Lucy looked at the lock.
“It’s an old one. The kind you can open with a hairpin.”
“I turned on the recorder when we were in the warehouse, just in case. And now I have your words about thallium, about how you knew about it. You incriminated yourself.”
Eleanor zbladła.
“It’s illegal. Recording without permission.”
“Poisoning people is illegal,” Sophia said quietly.
“I’ve been dying from your poison for two months. Every morning I woke up in hell and you were there, smiling.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Tal in storage. A pendant. You helped us find it. You had access to it. You often come to our apartment when I’m not there.”
“It’s circumstantial evidence. It doesn’t prove anything.”
“And the analysis, the capsule with your fingerprints. Do you think the forensics team won’t find anything?”
The mother-in-law remained silent.
Her face, usually haughty and confident, now expressed fear.
“What were you trying to do?” Sophia asked.
“Did you want to kill me? Or maybe you just wanted me to get sick so Alex would leave me?”
Eleanor swallowed hard.
“You are not worthy of him. And that is why I deserve to die.”
“I didn’t want this. I thought you’d just get sick. You’d become weak and helpless, and Alex would realize how pathetic and useless you are and abandon you. But thallium is deadly. I didn’t know,” her mother-in-law cried.
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