He’s gone off on a tangent, Pam North thought, half listening. What difference can it make that Mr. Notson makes drugs—or that Mr. Pitt tells people how to run offices and plants better—is an “efficiency engineer”? Because just a few minutes ago, somebody said something really important. Because it was wrong. Because—Oh! Pam thought. It’s on the tip of my mind. If people would only be quiet, so I could think. If Bill only wouldn’t go off on these—

“All kinds of drugs,” Bill was saying, from his tangent, in the distance. “Including preparations containing atropine?”

She heard Clark Notson say, “Yes. Sure.”

“Because,” Bill said, and now Pam heard him clearly—very clearly—“Miss Hartley had been given atropine. It might have been enough to have killed her, if she had not had quick and proper treatment. She’d had enough to bring on dizziness and double vision. So that, on the verge of losing consciousness, she fell downstairs and broke her neck. Well?”

He looked around.

“The ginger ale,” Jerry said. “The ginger ale I opened. That . . . opened so easily. Was that it?”

“Probably,” Bill said. “The cap taken off carefully. Put back on carefully. After enough atropine sulphate had been put in. Enough to stop her remembering.” Again he looked around at them; and Pam looked, too, and could see nothing—except shock—in any face. There seemed to be fear in none.

“The doctors suspected atropine from the start,” Bill said, speaking slowly. “But the symptoms of atropine poisoning are very similar to those of food poisoning—or ptomaine. If she had lived to be treated, almost any physician would have diagnosed food poisoning—particularly after Mr. Pitt remembered the olives—and treated for that. Not for atropine. Since the treatments are different, she probably would not have lived.” He paused. “Well,” he said, “what did she remember? So that there was death for remembrance?”

Phyllis Pitt covered her eyes with both hands and shook her head slowly, dully. Hortense Notson looked at Weigand with narrowed eyes and her husband with—Pam thought—something like defiance. Stanley Pitt looked at the floor and seemed deep in thought, to be planning each thought between thumb and finger, when Weigand turned from them and said, “Yes?” to a man in civilian clothes. He went to talk briefly with the man. He returned. He said the telephone was a useful thing; he said the Centertown police were efficient.