Jane’s Story
“Hello! Did you just move in for the new semester, too? I’m Charles. You going to the Donovan house party tonight?” The young man held out his hand to shake. He had a wide, friendly smile.
Jane looked from his hand to his face, expression blank, aching for the day when she no longer looked young enough to be one of the idiot university students.
“Neither you nor your parties hold anything of interest to me, pretty boy,” she said, brushing past him on her way to the basement stairs.
“No need to be rude, I was just trying to get to know my neighbors,” Charles said bitterly.
“Then next time consider that your neighbors might not want to get to know you.” Jane retorted as she descended the stairs.
Her behavior might have been a bit much, but Jane found the old methods worked best to ensure university students kept a wide berth. Besides, no use befriending someone she might have to kill one day. Unlikely though it was that John or Jim or whoever would require assassination, you never could be too careful.
The light in the basement flickered on, illuminating the various sundries required to maintain such a large apartment building – all the electrical circuitry for the lighting, huge gears whirring and delivering their mechanical power to the assorted machines throughout the building, and the now-hidden pulley system that worked the long-forgotten dumbwaiter. Jane intended for it to stay forgotten – she had been delighted to discover a perfect route between her apartment and the main floor that ensured no one could track her movements. Jane’s eyes gleamed as she saw the rats running inside the traps she’d placed around the room. A nice haul today. “Hello, my pretties,” she murmured.
Jane dumped the rats into her covered bucket and reset the traps. On her way back up, she got a few wrinkled noses at her exterminator’s garb and her bucket of skittering rodents, but no one bothered her. They all knew Jane got rent discounts for providing extermination services for the building and that she needed to bring the rats to the roof so she could gas them without gassing herself.
Her neighbors often wondered at how Jane could afford the top floor apartment as an exterminator. At which point someone would note the amount of vermin in the city and how Jane must therefore make a killing. Usually with a guffaw and a “pun intended!” following. And that was the end of that conversation.
This all of course was what the neighbors knew, which was not the same as the truth.
Instead, Jane entered her apartment, then carefully neutralized and reset all the booby traps on her front door. She then padded across the room and up the stairs to her roof. Most of the roof was covered with a large greenhouse. The apartment’s second bedroom (her office), spacious living room (her weapons and strength training area, of course), and modern kitchen (chemistry lab – Jane’s culinary interest rarely veered beyond eggs and toast) were nice, but this greenhouse was her happy place. The greenhouse was why she had sought the apartment at first. Convenient how the botany professor who had lived here before had died of a heart attack so suddenly.
Jane brought the bucket of rats over to her serpentarium and one by one dropped them into the cages. Watching her snakes feed never got old – their eager stillness as they sighted their prey, the lazy approach and lightning attack, the prey’s palpable fear, the hushed struggle as the prey shuddered to death. Jane’s favorite part was the moment she watched the light dim from their eyes, the moment they transitioned from life to death. Beautiful. Almost as beautiful as the patterns of the snakes’ scales – diamonds and leaves; vibrant vermilions, azures, and corals; flaring hoods. All Jane needed now was one of those rattlesnakes she’d heard about and her collection would be complete.
She gave the cages a fond pat before moving on – the snakes would be nice and sedate for milking their venom in a couple hours. Humming to herself, Jane went about feeding her poison dart frogs (as gorgeously deadly as her beloved snakes) and tending to her many plants – hemlock, nightshade, snakeroot, castor and jequirity beans, oleander, wolf’s bane – she had so many magnificent species.
Jane’s favorite part was merging the venoms and poisons, finding the exact combination that would deliver the exact degree of outcomes she wanted – whether pain, paralysis, fevers, shakes, simple nausea, or death. Odd how much like her father she was in that way. Admittedly, his chemical concoctions were for medicines, not poison, and he’d tried to pretend that he and Jane were nothing alike when he’d –
No matter, when the light had dimmed from his eyes, he knew well that they were two sides to the same coin.
With her chores complete, Jane pulled out the message she’d received a few hours ago – inconspicuously assassinate Viscount Beckwith within the month, eh? That would be a particular challenge. And he must have infuriated someone important, for his head was worth a pretty penny. She tapped the message against her fingers, looking to her pets and plants for inspiration.
Poison blowdart in the park? Indisbutably murder.
“Snake bite” on next week’s hunt? Too complicated. Plus she’d done it before.
Accidental shooting during the hunt? Too much possible exposure.
Poisoned alcohol? Prosaic – Jane had never done it herself, but it was the stock trick used by amateurs who wanted to cast suspicion towards the infamous, yet faceless, Jane Doe.
Mugging gone wrong? The viscount almost never walked.
“Suicide” by hanging? No one would buy it. He had a happy marriage and an heir born this year.
Heart attack? Beckwith was too young for plausibility.
Jane huffed in frustration. She wanted something elegant, untraceable. She made a slow turn around the greenhouse before snuggling into her leather reading chair. The most recent edition of the Gearhaven Medical Journal lay on the table next to her. Some might have called her subscription sentimental, as it had been the only thing to read in her house as a child. Silly. How else was she supposed to keep up on the latest medical advances, and therefore know how to more effectively terminate a person? Jane tilted her head, considering a snippet she’d read in it.
The bark of the bakli tree looks almost identical to that which comprises quinine, and, if consumed, is fatal.
The viscount had done his military service in the tropics, and was known to suffer severe bouts of malaria a few times a year.
Yes, this could do nicely. Jane didn’t even need bakli bark. A poison in Beckwith’s quinine would suffice. She also wouldn’t need to cover the flavor, as quinine tasted horrendous no matter how one took it. A concoction to cause malaria symptoms, a tainting of his quinine store, and the viscount would be dead within a week, no one to blame.
Jane grinned and popped out of her seat to get to work.
