Fed Up - By Jessica Conant-Park & Susan Conant Page 0,41

information about digitalis.

Wham! Digitalis was a genus of perennial plants, the most common being foxglove. As the daughter of two horticultural experts, I should have known! In fact, my parents would’ve been horrified to realize how little botanical information I’d absorbed over the years. In particular, I liked the common names of plants and had never bothered to learn botanical names. So, digitalis was a stranger, but foxglove was an old friend. I’d always adored the tall, spiked plants with their showy, tubular flowers.

Digitalis in the form of foxglove was obviously much easier to obtain than was digitalis in the form of a prescription medication. In fact, as I read about foxglove, I had to wonder why such a dangerous plant was positively all over the place: offered in seed catalogs, sold at garden centers, and grown in backyards. Every part of the foxglove was poisonous, and especially toxic were the leaves from the upper stem. The symptoms of having ingested foxglove were identical to those that Francie had shown. Furthermore, it had a strong, bitter taste. So that was why Josh’s arugula pesto and lamb had tasted so putrid! Dear God, all of us who’d tasted it could have died! I remembered how sick Josh had been. It was a blessing that in vomiting up everything in his system, he’d rid himself of most of the poison.

Damn. Instead of pestering people about possible cardiac conditions, I should have been asking about gardening. My questions about heart problems and family health histories had been awkward and unwelcome, but gardening was an ordinary topic that was easy to introduce in a casual conversation. My mother was always saying that gardening was the most popular hobby in America. Had anyone present at Leo and Francie’s house pursued the hobby?

Evan and Willie shared an apartment. I hadn’t been there, but they could be growing foxgloves in pots on a balcony or in a yard, and they might well not have realized how lethal a practical joke involving digitalis could be. Leo and Francie’s house had some kind of a disheveled garden, but I hadn’t really paid attention to it except to notice that it was a weedy mess. Foxglove was a biennial rather than a perennial. In its first year, it produced leaves, but it didn’t blossom until its second year. Then, I thought, it died. But it self-sowed. In other words, if someone had planted foxglove in Leo and Francie’s yard a long time ago, the descendants of the original plants could still be growing there. Although it was obvious that neither Francie nor Leo had been maintaining the garden, Leo might have known all about foxglove and might have known that it was growing right outside his house. Murders were often family affairs, weren’t they? They were on TV. So Leo had to be a suspect. What’s more, the rest of us had just met Francie. What possible motive could Robin, Marlee, Digger, or Nelson have had for killing her? None, so far as I could tell. Except possibly Nelson? Not that the cameraman had had anything personal against Francie, but he’d certainly been the weirdest person there. He’d kept spouting off at the mouth about the power of reality television, and he’d ghoulishly kept filming when Francie had fallen ill and after she’d died. He’d even tried to film the aftermath of the poisoning in the ER. Could Nelson have killed Francie only to have “reality” to film? If Nelson was, in fact, the murderer, he probably hadn’t cared which of us died. Maybe he’d even been disappointed to have only one victim. Sick thought, yes, but especially as a social-worker-to-be, I knew that there were sick people in the world.

I remembered something else potentially important. When Josh and I had both sampled some of the food before it had been served, there had been nothing wrong with it. But when we’d tasted the same food after Francie had complained so forcibly, it had been horrible. In between those two times, there’d been chaotic activity. The food had been served, returned to the kitchen, and served again. The scene at the dinner table had been filmed and filmed again. Everyone, or almost everyone, had had the opportunity to contaminate the food with poison. Marlee and Digger had handled the food when Robin and Nelson had accompanied them to the kitchen to reshoot the plates. Leo had had his hands all over the food, hadn’t he? To complicate matters, it seemed