The Woman in My Dress

She looked back.

That was all of it.

Evelyn Sterling was charged with conspiracy to commit murder and with administering a substance with intent to cause harm.

Her defense — that she was a frightened seventy-one-year-old woman who had said hysterical things in a hospital corridor — was reasonable, and might have worked, and did not survive two things.

The first was five witnesses.

The second was a spider plant.

Because on the morning after the phone call, Evelyn Sterling had walked into her son’s childhood bedroom, found the bed empty and the back door unlatched, and panicked — and in her panic she had done many things, but she had not thought about the plant on the windowsill.