If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Her head hit the wooden study table with a crash, and several medical students actually looked up from their reading.

  A. P. Hill was pacing the floor as usual. “I hope your sister comes up with something useful in the Morgan case,” she told her partner, “because you’ll never get Donna Jean out on bail, and I won’t have much time to help you with the case.”

  “Why not?” said Bill. A. P. Hill loved murder cases, so her announcement surprised him. He decided not to be offended that she had assumed he’d need assistance from her; she was probably right.

  “I’ve decided not to use any more delaying tactics on the Royden trial.” Powell’s face took on that greenish tint that usually accompanied the thought of Eleanor Royden, and she reached for the bottle of pink antacid.

  “I thought you said that defense lawyers ought to delay trials as long as possible so that people will forget the victims and the gory details of the crime. You said there was less emotion involved in a trial if you could stall for a year or so.”

  “That’s generally true, Bill, but not this time. Not when the defendant is Eleanor Royden, the Clown Queen of Crime. If I don’t get this trial over with soon, everyone on the planet will have heard of her. She’s giving interviews left and right, firing off sound bites that I cannot possibly explain away in court. If this goes on much longer, we’ll have to get jurors from Saturn to get a fair trial.”

  “How does she feel about the change of pacing?”

  A. P. Hill got herself a glass of water-the chaser for her dose of pink antacid. “Eleanor? She’s all for it. She thinks this will get her out of jail sooner.”

  “I suppose it could,” said Bill, who was always willing to look for the pony after he stepped in the fertilizer.

  “Yes, but it could also get her out of jail and into prison. Every time I have a meeting with Eleanor Royden, I come out feeling like there’s a volcano under my ribs. I can tell her what to wear, and how to fix her hair, but I can’t muzzle her! One snappy remark in court, one smirk at the wrong time-and she’s had it. I’m not in control of this case. I’m not even sure shell wear what I tell her. For all I know, she could turn up in court in a silver lame pantsuit.”

  Bill had never seen his partner so agitated. The problem with trying to offer her consolation was that Powell was absolutely correct in her assessment of the situation. Powell made it her business to be absolutely correct most of the time, but at the moment she wasn’t enjoying it. “Well, partner, you know I’ll help you in any way I can,” he said.

  A. P. Hill was still working out a tactful response to Bill’s offer when the phone rang. He snatched up the receiver. “MacPherson and Hill… Oh, hello, Mother.”

  A. P. Hill tuned out the subsequent conversation while she focused on her own misery, and on the fine points of Eleanor’s case. Suddenly she heard Bill say, “She’s what?” And then, “Where is she? Right. As soon as I can.” When he hung up the phone, it took him two tries to replace the receiver.

  “What is it, Bill?”

  “It’s Elizabeth,” said Bill, with disbelief still lingering in his voice. “She’s in the hospital in Charlottesville.” He glanced toward the receptionist area. “Edith! My sister is in intensive care. What did you two do this morning before she left for UVA?”

  “We had breakfast at Shoney’s at six, and then we drove out in the country and looked at Chevry Morgan’s love nest,” said Edith. “What do you mean, she’s in intensive care? What’s the matter with her?”

  “You didn’t see Donna Jean Morgan at the house?”

  “No. Neither wife was there.”

  “You didn’t stop by her place for coffee-?”

  “Bill.” A. P. Hill put her hand on his arm. “Donna Jean is in jail. Remember?”

  Bill blinked. “Oh, right. I was forgetting. It’s just that the doctors seem to think that Elizabeth has been poisoned. Mother’s on her way up there.”

  “Poisoned,” said A. P. Hill, sounding more intrigued than distressed. “I wonder how it was done.”

  “I have to go now.” Bill pulled his car keys out of his pocket and started for the door.

  A. P. Hill grabbed her purse and followed him out, “Bill, wait! I think I’d better drive.”

  “Give me a second to turn the answering machine on and lock the door!” Edith called after them. To herself she muttered, “Hope I don’t come down with it, too.”

  They put arsenic in his meat

  And stared aghast to watch him eat;

  They poured strychnine in his cup

  And shook to see him drink it up;

  They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:

  Them it was their poison hurt.

  – I tell the tale that I heard told.

  Mithridates , he died old.

  – A. E. HOUSMAN

  A Shropshire Lad

  11

  ELIZABETH MACPHERSON OPENED her eyes a fraction of an inch, just enough to discern anxious faces peering down at her. She squeezed them shut again.

  “I think she’s regaining consciousness,” someone whispered. It sounded like Bill’s voice.

  Elizabeth lay there, silently debating the merits of waking up or not, and whether any action on her part would result in an urgent need of a bedpan. She heard more murmuring, and the word nurse was repeated three or four times, at which point she decided that she might as well rejoin the living, because they were only going to poke and prod her until she did.

  The light hurt her eyes, and her head still felt like it was in a winepress. “I had a strange dream,” she said faintly. “And you were in it. And you. And you.”

  “Do you think she’s delirious?” The voice was definitely that of A. P. Hill, as clinical as ever.

  “I think she’s being a smart-ass,” Bill replied, with relief winning out over annoyance. “She’s quoting lines from The Wizard of Oz at us.”

  A. P. Hill did not think that such behavior was inconsistent with delirium, but since everyone else seemed relieved and amused, she allowed herself a judicious smile. “I’ll go out and tell Edith and Ms. Casey that she’s coming around,” she said.

  Margaret MacPherson nodded. “Thank you, Powell.” She leaned over her daughter’s bedside. “Elizabeth! Do start making sense, please. We want to know what happened to you.”

  Elizabeth looked thoughtful. “I was having a conversation with Cameron, I think,” she said. “He asked if I were angry with him for living so recklessly, taking off in that small boat, and all. I said I wasn’t, and I hugged him, and he said-oh, my head!” She closed her eyes again. “Can they give me something for this headache?”

  Margaret MacPherson and her son exchanged worried glances. “A nurse should be here soon, dear,” she told Elizabeth. “They’re going to want to know what happened to make you so ill. And now you come awake babbling about Cameron. Oh, Elizabeth! You didn’t do this to yourself, did you?”

  “I didn’t think of it,” whispered Elizabeth. “Isn’t that odd? All these weeks of grieving about Cameron, and it never once occurred to me. And now, of course, he has absolutely forbidden it, so that’s that.” She attempted to sit up in bed, and thought better of it as her joints began to ache. “What is the matter with me?”

  “Apparently, you were poisoned,” said Bill, sitting down again. He scooted the chair close to Elizabeth’s bedside. “But we can’t figure out how it was done, or by whom. Edith is especially concerned, of course.”

  Elizabeth managed a grin. “I expect she is! We shared the same breakfast buffet. It’s not food poisoning, then?”

  “Arsenic, they think. They’re running the tox screen again to make sure.”

  “Arsenic,” said Elizabeth. “That is interesting. I was reading about arsenic when I started to become ill. I was in the medical library.”

  “Hypochondria?” murmured her mother. “Some sort of sympathetic illness?”

  “Oh, Mother, really!” said the patient. “You’ve been eating too much tofu! Of course it
isn’t psychosomatic. Every muscle in my body will testify to that. I really was poisoned.”

  “When? How?” asked Bill. “Did you see Donna Jean? No, I keep forgetting. She’s in jail. Did she ever give you anything to eat or drink?”

  “No, of course not. If Edith isn’t sick, we can rule out breakfast, so it had to be something in that house. Dust? Can we ask Edith?”

  Edith, wrested away from the March edition of Field and Stream in the waiting room, tried to reconstruct the events of the morning. “We walked through the cemetery,” she said, frowning with the effort of remembering. “You found Lucy Todhunter’s grave. I don’t suppose she zapped you, though, after all this time. You didn’t chew on her flowers, or anything. Then you looked at some Civil War graves, and we climbed the wall and went in the house. We searched the kitchen, and the pantry. There wasn’t any food lying about, though.”

  “No,” said Elizabeth. “Even if there had been, do you think I would have risked eating it? In a house where a man died of poisoning?” She began to cough. “Bill, could you pour me some water, please?”

  Edith’s shouting made her head hurt even worse, and it attracted the attention of the nurse, thus suspending all conversation for several minutes while the visitors were ushered back out into the hall, and Elizabeth’s vital signs were verified and duly recorded on her chart. Even after the thermometer had been removed from her mouth, Elizabeth was unusually quiet. She was thinking about her afternoon’s research and about the one substance that she and Edith had not shared that morning: the drinking water from the Morgan kitchen.

  Tanya Faith Reinhardt-Morgan had accepted a ride to the mall with two girls she knew from school. She had to get out of her parents’ house, and she didn’t have much of anywhere else to go. The two girls who invited her were disappointed that she refused to talk about her recent bereavement, which, after all, had been their sole reason for asking her along. As soon as they reached the escalator, they had wandered off to look at cosmetics, an indulgence prohibited by Tanya Faith’s fundamentalist sect (polygamy, yes; lipstick, no).

  For lack of anything else to do, and lack of any money to do it with, she wandered into the video-and-pinball arcade to watch the teenage joystick pilots in action. As far as Tanya Faith knew, the Lord had not prohibited Pac-Man, or any of his ilk. She thought that the Lord might have done so, if He’d known about them, but as nothing on the subject had been handed down as yet, she decided to take advantage of the theological loophole and hang around, checking out the guys. As a token of her widowhood, she was wearing a black, below-the-knee-length summer dress with halter straps and a fitted waist. Tanya Faith looked quite fetching in black. She wished she could have worn lipstick, but the Lord was dead set against that, so she got around the restriction with regular and liberal applications of shiny, fruit-flavored (and tinted) lip balm-for medicinal purposes, of course.

  “Hello, Tanya Faith. Want to try this?”

  “Wh-what?” She was startled out of her reverie by a slender young man with dark hair and rather dazzling blue eyes. He looked familiar. Then she placed him: history class, the row by the window. She saw that he was offering her a brass coin.

  “It’s a token,” he said patiently. “You’ve been standing there for the longest time, just watching, so I thought you might enjoy playing a game.”

  “Oh.” She shook her head and blushed a little. “I wouldn’t have any idea how to go about it.”

  “I could show you. It isn’t hard.” He looked embarrassed. “Unless you think you shouldn’t because of what happened. Maybe it wouldn’t be seemly to have any fun. You know, out of respect and all.”

  “You mean Chevry?”

  The boy nodded. His dark hair had a sort of lilt in the front, and his eyes looked even bluer up close. His name was Mike Gibbs-she remembered hearing him called on in class. He wasn’t one of the advanced-placement show-offs, but he wasn’t a dweeb, either. “Yeah, I guess the whole school knows about it by now,” he was saying. “It was in the paper, your picture and everything. Tough break, after all you went through with him. But I guess you’re lucky that old lady didn’t kill you, too.”

  “Donna Jean? Oh, she’s mostly talk.” Tanya Faith was scornful of her rival. “And she’s going to jail anyhow.”

  “So you’re back with your folks now?”

  “Uh-huh.” She was looking at the flashing lights on the video game. On the side of the machine, there was a picture of a dark-haired young man with a sword, facing a dragon. “Do you think I could try that one?” she asked Mike.

  “If you’re sure it’s okay,” he said.

  “Oh, Chevry would want me to be happy,” she said quickly. “And I know the Lord wants me to go on with my life.” Tanya Faith’s greatest legacy from her late husband was the ability to determine that God’s will always coincided with her own inclinations.

  Elizabeth had summoned everybody back to her bedside with that feeble air of authority assumed by many of the infirm. “I have jobs for all of you,” she announced. “Bill, I need you to drive back out to the Morgan house and get a sample of the tap water from the kitchen.”

  “Couldn’t we phone the sheriff and ask him-”

  “Do it, Bill!” Elizabeth was in no mood for debating with attorneys, particularly those who were her blood relatives. “And, Edith, I hope my purse and my belongings made it to the hospital along with me.”

  “There’re some things in that metal locker,” Margaret MacPherson offered. “I know your clothes are there.”

  “Good. Edith, see if my notebook is in there. I was copying down some information from a periodical called Chambers. If you can’t find it, you’ll need to go to the medical library and start over for me.”

  Edith looked at Bill and A. P. Hill. “Are we calling this overtime?”

  “Send me an invoice,” snapped Elizabeth. “It can’t be higher than my hospital bill, and I want some answers.”

  “I was kidding!” said Edith cheerfully. “I don’t charge for playing detective. Just for typing and shorthand.” She opened the metal locker and began to rummage.

  “Powell, you’re interested in history. Do you know Everett Yancey?”

  “I think we’ve met,” said A. P. Hill. “He’s a local historian, though, not a reenactor. Why?”

  “I was reading something interesting about arsenic. An article on the history of arsenic said that laws had to be passed prohibiting the use of arsenic in embalming fluids, because its presence could skew the results of an autopsy in murder cases. So, I started wondering when did they use arsenic in the embalming process?”

  “Is that all you wanted to know?” said A. P. Hill. “I can tell you that. It was during the Civil War.”

  “Why?” asked Bill, who was trying to think of some nefarious way for the armies to use embalming fluid as a secret weapon. Nothing occurred to him, though: dead was dead.

  “Because they had a lot of bodies to contend with, and they were trying to find something that worked better as a preservative,” she replied. “Back in the eighteenth century, the recipe for corpse stuffing would have worked just as well on a rump roast: sage, thyme, rosemary. Undertakers just crammed a lot of sweet-smelling herbs into the deceased to keep him from stinking up the funeral. But the body decomposed at the normal, untreated rate, so burial had to take place quite soon after death.”

  “Which is why a few unembalmed people in comas occasionally got interred,” murmured Elizabeth. “No chance of that, these days.”

  “Right,” said A. P. Hill. “The preservative factor became an issue during the War Between the States, because soldiers were being killed hundreds of miles from home, and often their families wanted the bodies returned for burial in the local cemetery.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be on a train with a stack of parsley-scented corpses,” muttered Bill. “Anyhow, I thought they buried soldiers right on the battlefield.”

  “Some of them were,” said A. P. Hill. “But some bodies were sent home f
or burial.”

  “Officers,” said Edith, who had found the notebook and was heading out into the hall to read it.

  “That’s true enough,” A. P. Hill conceded. “Stonewall Jackson is buried in the cemetery in Lexington, a few blocks from his home. And Jeb Stuart is buried in Richmond. They both died of wounds, though, instead of on the field of battle. That might have made a difference, too. Anyhow, in an attempt to preserve the soldiers’ corpses long enough to get them home for burial, they started using stronger chemicals, including arsenic, in the embalming process.”

  “Bill,” said Elizabeth. “It’s a long way to Danville. Hadn’t you better get going?”

  “In a minute,” he said. “If you’re going to explain what all this is leading up to, I want to hear the rest of it.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” asked Elizabeth. “They put heavy-metal poisons into some of the soldiers’ corpses and sent them home to be buried in local graveyards.”

  Bill blinked uncomprehendingly. “So?”

  “In wooden coffins. Right, Powell?”

  “Most of the time, yes. Why?”

  “Edith and I saw some Civil War graves in that cemetery adjacent to the old house. I’ll bet some of them died a long way from Danville. A day’s ride would have been far enough away to warrant preservatives, though, especially in the summer.”

  A. P. Hill looked at her partner. “Get going, Bill!” she said. “We need to get that water sample tested to clear Mrs. Morgan!”

  “Will somebody please tell me-”

  “Bill, the bodies were packed with poison, and buried in wooden coffins one hundred and thirty years ago. The coffins have long since rotted away, and the bodies have decomposed. Where did the arsenic go?”

  He shrugged. “Into the soil, I guess.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “And into the groundwater. The well to the house must be on the side where the cemetery is located. Fortunately the concentrations of arsenic in the well water are not large enough to be fatal in a single dose, but arsenic is a cumulative poison. I drank three glasses of contaminated water, and I became seriously ill.”