I remain your friend and neighbor,Thomas Goodman.
“These poor people,” Kim murmured. This letter came the closest to anything she’d read so far in communicating to her the personal horror of the Salem witch ordeal, and Kim felt empathy for all involved. She could tell that Thomas was confused and dismayed at being caught between friendship and what he thought was the truth. And Kim’s heart went out to poor Elizabeth, who’d been rendered out of her mind with the mold to the point of terrorizing her own children. It was easy for Kim to understand how the seventeenth-century mind would have ascribed such horrifying and inexplicable behavior to witchcraft.
In the middle of Kim’s empathy she realized that the letter presented something new and disturbing. It was the mention of blood with its implication of violence. Kim didn’t even want to imagine what Elizabeth could have been doing in the shed with the livestock, yet she had to admit it might be significant.
Kim looked back at the letter. She reread the sentence where Thomas described that all the livestock was safe despite the presence of blood. That seemed confusing unless Elizabeth had done something to herself. The thought of self-mutilation made Kim shudder. Its possibility was enhanced by Thomas’s mention of droplets of blood on the floor in the house. But the blood in the house was mentioned in the same sentence with broken objects, suggesting the blood could have come from an inadvertent wound.
Kim sighed. Her mind was a jumble, but one thing was clear. The effect of the fungus was now associated with violence, and Kim thought that was something Edward and the others should know immediately.
Clutching the letter, Kim hastened from the castle and half-ran to the lab. She was out of breath when she entered. She was also immediately surprised: she’d walked into the middle of a celebration.
Everyone greeted Kim with great merriment, pulling her over to one of the lab benches where they had uncorked a bottle of champagne. Kim tried to refuse a beakerful but they wouldn’t hear of it. Once again she felt as if she were with a bunch of frolicsome collegians.
As soon as Kim was able, she worked her way over to Edward’s side to ask him what was going on.
“Eleanor, Gloria, and François have just pulled off an amazing feat of analytic chemistry,” Edward explained. “They’ve already determined the structure of one of Ultra’s binding proteins. It’s a huge leap forward. It will allow us to modify Ultra if need be or to design other possible drugs that will bind at the same site.”
“I’m happy for you,” Kim said. “But I want to show you something that I think you ought to see.” She handed him the letter.
Edward quickly scanned the letter. When he looked up at Kim he winked at her. “Congratulations,” he said. “This is the best one yet.” Then, turning to the group he called out: “Listen up, you guys. Kim has found the greatest bit of proof that Elizabeth had been poisoned with the fungus. It will be even better than the diary entry for the article for Science.
The researchers eagerly gathered around. Edward gave them the letter and encouraged them all to read it.
“It’s perfect,” Eleanor said, passing it on to David. “It even mentions she’d been eating. It’s certainly a graphic description how fast the alkaloid works. She’d probably just taken a bite of bread.”
“It’s a good thing you eliminated that hallucinogenic side-chain,” David said. “I wouldn’t want to wake up and find myself out with the cows.”
Everyone laughed except Kim. She looked at Edward and, after waiting for him to stop laughing, asked him if the suggestion of violence in the letter bothered him.
Edward took the letter back and read it more carefully. “You know, you have a good point,” he told Kim when he was finished the second time. “I don’t think I should use this letter for the article after all. It might cause some trouble we don’t need. A few years ago there was an unfortunate rumor fanned by TV talk shows that associated Prozac with violence. It was a problem until it was debunked statistically. I don’t want anything like that to happen to Ultra.”