Our future was promised. The simple pleasures of our garden and the sun warming our old skins. But Mr. Lovell began to threaten us, bombarding us with anonymous telephone calls. He told us we had blood on our hands. We knew it was him, though. The distinctive rhythm of the old ceiling fan in the shop gave him away.

We dared not kill him because we could not be certain whom he might have told. Because we had lost the element of surprise. Because he had a gun.

But it forced us to think. If he did tell the police about the blood on the walls, they might follow the trail back to the day of the puppet show. To the discovery of Birdie’s body.

But there would be no trail if no one was left to remember.

And who better to frame than a loner who makes dolls, an old man with a skeleton in his closet, one we wanted out of our lives?

Cooper had spent his life surrounded by plants and flowers, and I absorbed this knowledge without trying to. The Poison Garden, it was called. A book with photographs so glossy they might have been painted.

Page three hundred and eleven. A plant with the most beautiful purple flowers I had ever seen, like the cowl of a monk’s hood. The most toxic plant in the garden.

The Northumberland estate where Cooper had worked the summer we got married had a wall of these plants at the far end by the manor house. I was curious about the way their helmets danced in the breeze, the disconnect between beauty and brutality.

When we returned home, I read everything I could. That knowledge stayed with me all my life.

The trick was to overcome the bitterness and disguise the taste. To experiment. Last year, I bought a kitten, ground the root into her meat and jelly, and she ate the lot. When I found her in the laundry basket, hidden amongst the tumble of dirty clothes, she was dead.

Cooper grew the plants and I used them in the cakes that I prepared. Depressed a syringe filled with poison into the raisins. Sugar to sweeten the taste. As a neighborhood watch coordinator, he had a ready-made alibi. Once we had traced our victims and established they were at home by themselves, we posed as fund-raisers selling Dundee cakes for charity. Who could refuse an old lady in a wheelchair? On the doorstep, I faked a dizzy spell and we were invited in. If they declined the cake, we forced it into them. The paralysis that followed allowed us to lift their bodies into my wheelchair, heads slumped, tucked under a blanket. By the time we got home, they were usually dead. We removed the eyes, painted the face and later, when the dark came, Cooper pushed my wheelchair into the woods, except it wasn’t me sitting in it.