Chapter 21 · The Pharmacy Ledger

The pharmacist's body was already cold when James got there.

The coroner said heart attack. Natural causes. The man was sixty-three, overweight, smoked like a chimney. James stood in the back room of Brennan's Pharmacy and stared at the empty chair behind the counter. The ledger sat open on the desk. Page after page of names and orders, all logged in neat script.

He'd been here yesterday. Alive. Nervous as hell when James asked about arsenic orders, but alive.

"Detective?" The coroner's assistant hovered in the doorway. "We're taking him now."

James waved him off. He flipped back through the ledger, scanning dates. March. February. January. There. December 1926. An order for white arsenic, listed as rat poison. The signature at the bottom made his stomach drop.

Philip Roy.

Not a patient's name. Not a prescription pickup. The lawyer himself had walked in and signed for it.

James pulled the page close. The handwriting matched the contract signatures he'd seen a dozen times in Ashford legal files. Confident. Sharp angles. No attempt to disguise it.

He'd called Vivian greedy. He'd told her she was lying to keep her inheritance.