“Eliza, who’s your friend in Florida?”

She stopped squirming and gnashing her teeth against the rag. Her eyes shrank to tiny, mean slits, and she slowly shook her head back and forth.

“Okay,” I said, “that’ll work. I’ll just ask yes-or-no questions and you can shake your head. That’ll work fine.”

At that, she threw her nose into the air and stared at the ceiling. I might have expected as much, but her refusal did not daunt me. I could get a knee-jerk reaction out of her, and that was something. It was more than “nothing.”

I decided it was safe to act on my assumption that her correspondent was male. “Tell me, Tatie. Your friend in Florida. You’ve known him for a very long time, haven’t you? We found some stuff in your room that tells us you’ve known him for fifty years, if you’ve known him a day.”

Her eyes didn’t release their death grip on the ceiling, but she didn’t huff as though I’d said something stupid and wrong. Her hands had instantly gone into hard-knotted fists where they were strapped to the armrests, and it was not because she was tied inhumanely.

“Is he a family member?”

Nothing. Not even a twitch at the corner of an eye.

“This swamp water he’s sending you, it’s some kind of medicine?” She continued her steadfast policy of nonreaction, so I wiggled the cork loose and smelled at it again, squinting down the neck of the bottle. “I have a hard time believing that. And you take this regularly?”

“It’s for her rheumatism,” Harry reiterated without enthusiasm. Eliza pivoted her head just enough to glare over at him instead of the ceiling, then permitted herself a half nod.

“I don’t buy that. Not for a second.”

“This conversation cannot go anywhere, Eden. She’s not going to tell us anything.” My coconspirator was growing tired of the games, or possibly just tired. Lord knew I was beat like an old rug. I would have given anything to lie down in the big bed upstairs they’d assigned me earlier, and go to sleep as I ought to have.

But there were bigger things at stake than circles under our eyes. “Eliza, what would you do if I threw this out? Flushed it down the toilet? Would you care?”

Her head jiggled ever so slightly, signifying the negative.

“Not at all?”

She did it again, more firmly. Harry was wrong. Whatever the vial contained, it was important enough to Eliza that she wanted me to think it was useless. If it had really been something ordinary, she would have left her eyes on the ceiling and kept her head stationary.

“All right, then, maybe I’ll just dump it down the sink in the kitchen.” I left her immediate vision and walked towards the door.