Bring Your Own Poison Read Free Page B

“How do you know all this?”
    â€œHis first wife was a girl from down around Winona,” Mayrene said, “I knew her mama and daddy, Betty and Jack Treadwell. It liked to have killed them when she died.”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œShe was home by herself one night—asleep, or so they said—and the house caught on fire,” Mayrene said, her face dark with anger. “The smoke got to her before she could get out of the house.”
    â€œHow did the fire start?” Wanda Nell asked, trying not to picture the girl’s death in her mind.
    â€œSome kind of explosive,” Mayrene said. “They never did find out who set it. A lot of people thought it was Travis because of the insurance settlement he got. They couldn’t ever prove anything, though.”
    â€œIf it wasn’t him,” Wanda Nell said, “then who else could have done it?”
    â€œTravis claimed it was somebody who’d threatened him,” Mayrene said, and the scorn in her voice indicated what she thought of that idea. “He helped get some pretty nasty guys sent to the state pen at Parchman, or so he said. He claimed they said they’d come after him when they got out and make him sorry.”
    â€œSeems like that could have happened,” Wanda Nell said.
    â€œMaybe,” Mayrene conceded, “but right after he got hold of that insurance money, he bought himself a fancy sports car. And he was courting some other girls less than three months after his first wife died.”
    â€œThat’s pretty tacky,” Wanda Nell said, wrinkling her nose.
    â€œIt gets worse,” Mayrene said. “A couple years after his first wife died in that fire, he got married again. To one of the girls he started running around with right after his wife was killed.” She snorted. “Some say he was running around with them even before poor Jeanie Treadwell died.”
    â€œAnd something happened to the second wife, too?”
    â€œYou bet it did,” Mayrene said. “The house they were living in burned down, too. Another explosive device, but this time the wife wasn’t home.”
    â€œCreepy,” Wanda Nell said. She was terrified of house fires.
    â€œYou got that right,” Mayrene replied. “Well, a couple months after that house burned down, the second wife was driving home late one night. They were living out in the country, and somebody ran her off the road into a steep ditch. Her car rolled over several times, and she died.”
    â€œThat’s horrible,” Wanda Nell said. It was all too easy to picture. A country road late at night, no lights other than car lights—or moonlight if you were lucky. Wanda Nell shivered at the thought. It was bad enough driving around Tullahoma late at night with streetlights.
    â€œIt was,” Mayrene said, “because it turned out she was two months pregnant.” She paused for a moment. “Travis had a big insurance policy on her, too.”
    â€œDidn’t anybody try to investigate him that time?” Wanda Nell had thought Mayrene was maybe exaggerating at first, but the more she heard about this man, the more she was inclined to believe her friend.
    Mayrene shrugged. “They might have, but what were they gonna do? He’s a policeman, and the police department stood up for him. Travis claimed it was probably one of those same guys that threatened him that ran her off the road.”
    â€œSo you’re telling me they didn’t really investigate it?”
    Shrugging again, Mayrene said, “I think they probably did some kind of half-assed poking around, but it didn’t amount to a hill of beans.” She snorted in disgust. “So much for our police department.”
    â€œIf you feel that way,” Wanda Nell said, not certain how her friend would take this question, “then why are you going out with one of them?”
    â€œI know, I know.” Mayrene got