Chapter Seventy Dottie
Chapter Seventy
Dottie
I’m leaving. I just need a little more time to get that old car running again. And then I’ll sneak out after they go to bed.
Together, apparently.
I was going to wait for Daddy to come home from Florida, but I can’t. I need to leave now. I can’t live like this. I can’t stay here another second.
Because I think Peggy and Dickie are trying to kill me.
Last week, I sat down at lunchtime to eat the au gratin potatoes Peggy served in my favorite cornflower CorningWare casserole dish.
It was picture perfect, like something out of the Betty Crocker cookbook. And it’s so much work, to make me an individual casserole each day for lunch when I’d be happy with a peanut butter sandwich and an apple, like she has.
But every day, she goes to all that trouble just for me. And she never eats a bite of it. Never saves the leftovers. Never heats it up in the oven and gives it to Dickie for dinner. In fact, she scrapes anything I don’t eat directly into the garbage.
Yesterday, I watched her like a hawk.
She brought flowers in from the garden, the last hydrangeas and foxglove of the season, and put them in one of those Hull vases that belonged to my mother.
I went into the den and pretended to watch Days of our Lives, but I could see her making my lunch out of the corner of my eye and then I noticed it.
She reached up and snipped a tiny fragment from a foxglove leaf. Then she chopped it up really small and put it in my casserole.
I looked up foxglove in the encyclopedia. Every single part of that flower is poisonous, from the flowers to the stem to the leaves. Eating it causes nausea, headache, skin irritation, and diarrhea. It can also cause foggy thinking and disorientation.
This explains why I’ve been so tired. Why I sleep so much, and why my stomach is upset.
I thought it was grief, when it’s actually poison, in a very small dose.
A large dose stops your heart.