05.21.2021 (TRANSCRIBED)
- Oranges- Orange Juice
- Figs
- Those fig Bars
- Dates (MEDJOOL dates! NOT Deglet Noor! MEDJOOL! Make sure they're MEDJOOL DATES)
- Minestrone soup
- Aluminum foil
- Cling wrap
- Frozen peas
- Pickled herring
- Sardines
Separate note to self: watch more Love Island
05.14.2021 I HAVE ALL MY TOES, AND THEN SOME!
Things have gone from worse to worse to worse. My internal monologue has been entirely replaced by an internal dialogue between Poirot and Hastings.HASTINGS: Well, I suppose Mrs. Arnolds is as good as got. The evidence is irrefutable. To think! Mrs. Arnolds, a murderess!
POIROT: Is this so?
HASTINGS: She looks like such a prim and proper woman, but I suppose you never can tell. Perhaps you’re losing your touch, Poirot. Mrs. Arnolds seems the obvious killer when one knows the facts of the case. We should have seen from the start!
POIROT: Ah! But mon ami! You are most certain the evidence is, as you say, irréfutable?
HASTINGS: Why certainly! She was caught red handed, so to speak! It was a stroke of genius to search all of the umbrellas in the house, realizing that the pills could have fallen into an umbrella stand and landed in an open one. The incriminating packet of pills was right there in the coat closet all along!
POIROT: Ah, but Hastings, it is not, you think, trop simple? The pills so carelessly hidden in a moment of panic? A killer so calculating and cold blooded to have planted false evidence for months if not years before the crime, she is the same one who loses or hides the murder weapon in a place where any reasonable Scotland Yard detective will find it? Or where it might be found the next time a guest borrows an umbrella? It is strange, no?
HASTINGS: Why, all killers make mistakes eventually. Mrs. Arnolds is a regular Lady Macbeth and the proverbial blood on her hands made them shake like an arthritic's. She lost her nerve when she realized what she had done!
POIROT: Non, non, non, mon ami. This is not the case, not at all. Your "obvious killer,” as you call her, is not our murderer.
HASTINGS: What do you mean? Are you saying that she was framed?
POIROT: Non. I am simply saying, my good Hastings, that she did not kill.
HASTINGS: But I don’t understand!
POIROT: At first, I did not either. All the clues seem to point, sans doute, to Mrs. Arnolds. The cyanide pills. The threatening letter. The argument overheard by her maid. The green shawl. She had a motive to kill, she had an opportunity to kill, and I saw in her eyes fear and remorse, which hinted that she had, in fact, killed. Yet certain discrepancies in the case have troubled me most deeply.
HASTINGS: Poirot! If there’s something I’m not seeing please enlighten me with all haste!
POIROT: Patience, mon ami, patience. We will reach the answer in due time. Let us begin by speaking of mathematics. You might have an equation with more than one solution, but, by imposing on it more and more constraints, perhaps you can create a set of conditions such that there is only one real solution — I am no master of mathematics, but this is so, yes?
HASTINGS (sputtering): B-but - why - yes - but I don’t see —
POIROT (interrupting): Of course you do not see, cher Hastings, which is why I am telling you. This murder was an equation for which at first I could find many imaginary solutions and three very real solutions. Thus, at risk of sounding like your beloved Sherlock Holmes, my main detective work was not to solve the crime — for, as I said, there were many solutions — but to find the constraints such that only one solution could be true. Oui?
HASTINGS: I don't understand!
POIROT: Let us begin by looking at the three possible solutions to the crime. We will then eliminate two until only one solution remains.
HASTINGS:
POIROT:
HASTINGS:
POIROT:
HASTINGS:
POIROT:
(I can feel my body rotting.)