But she was still talking, almost musing. “Before I started down this road, I tried to imagine the worst thing I could do to a person. That was easy. My husband died young, and that was hard, but it didn’t break me. I’m dying now myself, and it’s not so bad. When I learned I had a few months left, I went right to my daughter and told her, and she put her arms around me, and I knew she’d go on living, after. It’s the natural order. She is my real comfort. I understood then that losing a child would be the worst thing. But Mr. Shaw didn’t have any children. I had to get real direct with his bill. The most precious thing he had was his own sorry life. In some ways it felt like letting him off easy. I thought to myself, well, it’s the best you can do. Now, though, between Mr. Shaw and Gee-Off. I think I liked what happened to Mr. Shaw better. It’s so . . .” She paused, word hunting. “Relaxing. He’s in hell before me, and that feels right. And I know I made the world better by taking him off it. I don’t know if that baby, Gee-Off, would have made the world better or worse. No one will know now. That doesn’t seem fair, and all I want is to make things come around fair before I die. I look at your boy here, and he’s a sweet baby. I think maybe I ought to go another route.”

“Yes,” I said. “I want that.”

Gabrielle reappeared in the doorway. She’d been listening from the hall, crying silently. Her large, dark eyes were swollen, and the whites shone pink.

“I do, too.” Her voice turned musing. “Maybe I knew it even before I took your boy. Why else give you extra pills? Maybe I wanted to know if it would feel fair if Spencer Shaw was dead. It did. It does. And I don’t want to put this baby in the water. So.” She paused. “You see where I’m going.”

“Yes.” I did. My gaze fell to the silver flask holding that deadly shot of Pappy, gleaming on the table. Cyanide, or something close to it, she’d said. Marshall understood her, too, his eyebrows lowering, and Gabrielle looked close to being ill. She was already shaking her head in an emphatic no. “You want me to give Trey the other pills. You’ll trade his life for Robert’s.” My voice was dead flat. Not even I could tell if I was considering this choice.