Page 111 of Don't Tell Me How to Die

As soon as he was out the door, I ran to the bathroom, stuck my finger down my throat, and vomited. I kept at it, dry heaving until my throat was sore. Then I transferred a few ounces of tea to one of the sterile containers Alex keeps in his home office.

Johnny took it to a lab in Jersey.

“It’s gonna be three days, kid,” he said. “Hang in there. Just keep acting like everything is normal. You know... happy, upbeat, loving your life.”

“Normal,” I repeated. “Happy, upbeat, loving my life—just like Arnold Sinclair’s wife did for the three days before he murdered her and her son in their beds.”

SIXTY-EIGHT

I still had one more critical assignment on my middle-aged Nancy Drew things-to-do list.

“Find proof that Alex knows about you and the chief,” Johnny had said.

“What am I looking for?” I asked.

“Beats me. It could be anything—pictures, videos, maybe he hired a private detective and there’s a written report. But it also could be electronic, like a flash drive, a memory stick, or one of those cloud thingies. I don’t know shit about computers, but you’ve got teenagers. Maybe they can explain it to you.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “I’ll just say, ‘Hey, kids, Daddy is planning to kill Mommy. Can you help me hack into his cloud thingy so I can find out what he has on me?’”

“You love doing this, don’t you?” Johnny said.

“Doing what?”

“You dig yourself a hole, and then you act like I’m the one with the shovel. All I know is that Alex is not going to murder his wife on a rumor. He needs hard evidence. Your job is to find it.”

I spent the next three days looking. I searched the house from top to bottom and back again. When Alex was asleep, I went to the garage and combed through every inch of his car.

Everything on his computer was password protected. But he accumulated so many passwords that he had to install a password manager to keep track of them all. Then he realized that if anything happened to him, I wouldn’t be able to access our bank accounts, credit cards, insurance policies, or any of the countless websites that secure our electronic secrets.

So he gave me his master password. “It’s not an invitation to go through my stuff,” he said to me, half joking, half serious. “It’s just in case of emergency.”

I’d never been interested in hisstuff, but I decided that saving my life qualified as an emergency, and I scoured his home computer.

I found nothing. Three days later I met Johnny at the diner, prepared to give him the bad news. But as soon as I sat down, he handed me a lab report.

“You were right,” he said. “The tea was laced with vitamin D—about twenty times the daily dose. Not enough to kill you, but over time, the toxicity builds up, and it leads to heart irregularities, kidney failure, and death.”

I could barely breathe. A wave of powerful emotions flooded over me now that my worst fears were fact. Shock. Anger. Despair. Heartbreak. Betrayal. But most of all, I ached for the life Alex and I could have had.

“I’m sorry,” Johnny said. “But at least now we know for sure.”

I shrugged. It wasn’t exactly the kind of consolation prize to get excited about.

“What did you find?” he asked.

“Nothing. I searched everywhere. The basement, the attic, his office, his car, his computer—I can’t find a thing.”

“Then keep looking.”

“To what end?” I asked. “You just proved that he’s trying to poison me. Who cares how he found out about me and Van?”

“Because in the words of the famous Chinese philosopher, ‘The more you know, the better off you are.’”

“If you mean Aristotle, I believe the actual quote is ‘The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.’ And he was Greek, not Chinese.”

“Fine. He was Greek. But the restaurant where I read the quote was Chinese. Look,MayorDunn, if somebody tipped off Alex, that’s one more person who knows about your affair. That person has the power to destroy your life. We have to find out who they are.”

“You’re right,” I said. “But I’ve looked everywhere. There’s nothing.”