Headscratchers / Petals on the Wind

• When Carrie lies dying of self-inflicted arsenic poisoning, the doctors frantically try to determine what's wrong with her. Meanwhile, in the hallway, Cathy shows Christopher what she's just found in Carrie's closet: a package of arsenic rat poison and a box of doughnuts with only one left. How does she have those items? If she's just discovered them, she should give them to the doctors so that they know what's killing her sister! And if she's already informed them, shouldn't those items be in a lab being tested?
  • Well, if IIRC, the book takes place some time in 1960s-1970s, so the idea of lab testing things for poisons wasn't commonplace, along with that arsenic poisoning can resemble symptoms of other ailments (if I remember some murder cases correctly, they only figured out that the victim died of arsenic poisoning after linking the case with other cases and cross-matching the symptoms). Likewise, rat poison isn't hard to get a hold of, especially in that time period and if one remembers that rodenticide was, at one point, a pretty common kitchen item. The donuts, on the other hand, she either baked them herself, or she brought them somewhere.
    • If the hospital had not yet tested for poison because they had no reason to suspect it, and Cathy found evidence that Carrie had poisoned herself with rat poison, she should have given them that evidence immediately so that they could narrow down the course of treatment (by determining the specific brand, the dosage, etc). They certainly wouldn't give the doughnuts back to Cathy; those would probably go into the incinerator once they'd been tested and documented. And if Cathy was holding on to the doughnuts and note to show Chris before giving them to Carrie's doctors, she was literally wasting hours of her sister's life. Point is, the only reason Cathy still had those physical items (as opposed to simply telling Chris what she'd found and showing him Carrie's letter) was for a dramatic reveal. If the dramatic reveal was on the author's part, then she doesn't know how hospitals work; if it was on the character's part, it paints a negative picture of Cathy being so hellbent on making this gesture that she risked Carrie's life.

• Why does Cathy so fervently blame Julia for what happened with Paul? So the man straight-up admits to raping her on their wedding night and several times after the fact, then begins having affairs, one of which results in a pregnancy, then she goes ballistic and tries to drown herself and their son, succeeding with the latter. When Cathy hears this, she’s all, “I couldn't believe what Julia had done” and so forth. Look, it’s horrible that she killed their son, but she was raped multiple times by a man whom she thought loved her, and this was after a childhood trauma. Then she found out Paul was cheating, and the pain she had endured in their marriage was for nothing. And all of this is told from Paul’s perspective, which in turn is told to us through Cathy’s. I wouldn’t be surprised if even more unsavory elements were filtered out.