Never hurry: Faye's long illness

Kate never hurries. She fixes the end, forgets it, and works only on the means. She lets Alex the cook believe he leaked the will, then manoeuvres the girls into asking Faye about it in person so that every one of them has read it. A feigned illness gets her Dr. Wilde's pills, and an early-morning visit to his unlocked office gets her five small bottles out of his dispensary. Meanwhile the house becomes the best on the Row: presents for tidy rooms, Alex convinced that preserving was his own idea, Cotton Eye off the opium and playing Beethoven. Faye, quietly suspicious since the dreams, tests her by proposing a trip to Europe and asking whether she still turns tricks. Then the tonic starts tasting bitter, and a Sunday supper of home-preserved string beans puts them both on the floor. Dr. Wilde diagnoses botulism and marvels at their luck. Faye never recovers, and on the last night Kate feeds her a new medicine from an eye-dropper and buries the bottles in the wet weeds.

The method is stated as a principle in the first paragraph and then demonstrated at length, so the reader watches the machine run rather than waits for a revelation. Kate poisons herself as thoroughly as her victim, which buys the diagnosis and four months of visible devotion. The cruellest touch is that the house genuinely improves, because the same attention serves both ends.