“An outhouse,” David Markham repeated firmly. “It’s against sixteen different building codes, and that doesn’t matter a damn, not in Belleville and not in anyplace south of here. Hillbillies. That’s what Maryanne’s family was. A pack of hillbillies who’d come down into town and bought shoes. Most of the people south of here are pretty decent. Ignorant and uneducated but decent. But Maryanne’s father. Well, Maryanne’s father was what the academic snobs around here really mean when they use the word hillbilly. Do you know what I’m trying to get at?”
“Of course,” Gregor said. “Whatever else went on here today, Miss Maryanne Veer did not try to commit suicide.”
“Exactly,” David Markham said.
“I don’t understand,” Tibor said. “Why does it mean she would not have tried to commit suicide? From this description, Krekor, I would think she would have had great cause for depression.”
“True,” Gregor told him, “but she would never have used lye. Don’t you remember what that girl was saying when we were pouring milk? Maybe you weren’t there. There was a girl, Chessey something—”
“Chessey Flint.”
“Whatever. She was talking about some cabin some club has up in the woods somewhere—”
“The Climbing Club. On Hillman’s Rock.”
“It doesn’t matter, Tibor. The point is, the cabin has outhouses behind it, and next to the outhouses she says there’s a tub of lye. Marked as lye, at any rate. The point is, what you clean outhouses with is lye.”
“Maryanne Veer grew up with outhouses,” David Markham said. “She knew too much about lye to think of using it on herself. That leaves two alternatives. Accident and attempted murder.”
“Maybe not,” Gregor said.
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s dispense with accident, in the first place,” Gregor said. He explained about the broken teacup, about the foaming action of lye in water—which would have been superfluous, because David Markham obviously knew all about lye, except that Gregor had no idea where Tibor had been during his original explanation—and about the absence of any sign of any other food anywhere near the body. Of course, I could be wrong, he said. I had to do my looking around while I was administering an antidote to a woman with third-degree burns in her throat. Those are hardly the best of conditions for making an eyeball search. But before we started administering the antidote, there was a period, maybe a full minute and maybe less, when everyone was frozen. And I didn’t see anything else on the floor then, either. She ingested lye. It had to have been something she ate immediately before she began to gag, because lye works that quickly. It couldn’t have been in her tea. It had to have been in something else. The something else is now missing.”
“Whoosh,” David Markham said.
“There’s also the obvious,” Gregor told him. “I could write you a scenario to show you how lye could get into the tea water, accidentally. I couldn’t write you one to show you how lye got into, say, a sandwich, accidentally.”
“Then it does have to have been murder,” David Markham said, “or attempted murder. Please God, attempted murder. With any luck, they’ll get her up to County Receiving and straighten her out in time.”
Gregor nodded. “We got to her early. It shouldn’t be impossible. But as for murder or attempted murder—look, have you ever heard of anyone who was actually murdered with lye?”
“I’ve heard of plenty of people who have died from it,” David Markham said. “Kids, especially. Every year you get one or two who get into the Drano and there they go.”
“Accidents.” Gregor waved that away. “I’ve read about those things myself. But you’re right, Mr. Markham, it’s almost always children, who are smaller and have less resistance, and the accidents are almost always bizarre. I remember a case a few years ago where a zookeeper fell off a ledge into a vat of the stuff that had been mixed with water to clean a bears’ cage. The results were predictably nasty. But murder—no. I’ve never heard of a single person who was murdered with lye. I’m not entirely sure it could be done.”
“But Krekor,” Tibor said, “why not? The substance is lethal.”
“Yes, the substance is lethal, but look at the facts in the present situation. Miss Maryanne Veer is not dead. There’s a good chance she will not be dead, not from this, although she may be severely damaged. Lye is an extremely corrosive alkali. As soon as it touches the skin, it burns and it burns badly. Anyone ingesting it with food would do just what Miss Maryanne Veer did. One sip—or one bite. Instant pain. Excruciating pain. Then she’d drop whatever she was holding and try to spit out whatever was in her mouth. She might swallow a little because swallowing is a reflex, and she wouldn’t have to swallow much to do herself severe damage, but it’s highly unlikely she’d swallow enough to die unless she was prevented from reaching medical help. And even then it would take two or three days.”