“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.”
“I believe your condition is listed as fair, dear,” said Margaret MacPherson.
Her friend Casey said, “Oh, Margaret, don’t belittle her symptoms. If you can’t dramatize your own poisoning when can you enjoy ill health?”
“Thank you,” said Elizabeth. She reached for a glass of water from the bedside table, looked at it for a long moment, and set it back down untouched. “As I was saying, I drank less than a pint of the water, altogether. Chevry Morgan must have been drinking it for weeks in the evening while he worked to refurbish the old house.”
Bill nodded. “Donna Jean mentioned that he had been complaining of aches and pains. She thought it was a virus. She said that Tanya Faith had been affected, too.”
“Tanya Faith sometimes went to the house with Chevry to keep him company while he worked. But Donna Jean never did. She never ingested any poisoned water. Chevry, who worked there almost every night, drank the most. The concentration levels might have varied, too. Anyhow, sooner or later it killed him.”
“Donna Jean Morgan really is innocent,” Bill said wonderingly.
“Oh, honestly, Bill, I don’t know how you lawyers sleep at night,” snapped his sister. “Yes, she does happen to be innocent. I think we can chalk up Chevry Morgan’s death to the Confederacy’s score: a belated casualty of the Late Unpleasantness.”
“I prefer to call it divine intervention,” said Edith from the doorway. She was holding Elizabeth’s notebook and smiling.
“So Donna Jean didn’t use her great-grandmother’s recipe for husband poisoning?” asked Bill, trying to assimilate this new information.
“It wouldn’t have worked on Chevry,” said Edith, grinning. “Old Lucy Todhunter killed her husband with a plain old doughnut.”
“I thought so,” said Elizabeth.
Eleanor Royden was alone in her cell. She knew that later—if she ended up in the barracks of women’s prison—she might actually long for such isolation, but just now she was finding it difficult. Solitude had never been one of Eleanor’s favorite things. She liked parties, witty dinner companions, and the sound of friendly laughter. She and Jeb had given some wonderful parties in Chambord Oaks. Everyone had said that no one could match her for delightful dinners and a stimulating mix of people. Jeb had taken that for granted, of course. He thought that sit-down dinners for sixteen simply happened while he was in circuit court. Hell find out differently when he tries to entertain with the bimbo, she thought.
And then she remembered: Jeb was dead.
For an instant she wished he weren’t dead, because he would know which lawyer to recommend to take her case. (He would not have chosen A. P. Hill. Eleanor could almost hear him accusing her of making a sentimental choice at the risk of losing her case. But what choice did she have, when all of the lawyers he would have suggested were cronies of his who thought she deserved the death penalty?)
And he would figure out some sort of image to project to the public; Jeb was very good about managing his clients’ publicity. She wondered what he would think of her new celebrity: her photo in the Washington Post, an interview in Vanity Fair, and even a mention in Jay Leno’s opening monologue. None of this publicity had been favorable—she had to admit that—but at least she was famous. Her name was even on T-shirts.
It was quite a change from being the anonymous wife of a local power broker. Now she was somebody in her own right.
But Jeb was still dead. He would never know how important she had become; how cleverly she used her wit and charm to dazzle the press. He would never respect this new Eleanor, because he was dead. He wasn’t going to come to his senses, and give up Staci the sex toy. He wasn’t going to miss Eleanor, or ask her forgiveness.
In fact, if any consciousness of Jeb Royden survived anywhere, it was probably furious with her. Jeb Royden was actually dead. Eleanor thought it was amazing that someone as confident and powerful as Jeb Royden could actually be killed by a bullet smaller than a tube of lipstick. Such a big, loud, arrogant man, with his law degree, his Armani suits, and his friends in high places—and little, middle-aged Eleanor of the cheap apartment and the dead-end life had snuffed out all that magnificence with a thimbleful of cylindrical metal. Perhaps if she had been able to believe in his mortality, she wouldn’t have had to shoot him.
Actually, she hadn’t meant to obliterate Jeb Royden altogether. She had wanted to destroy the new Jeb—the pompous status seeker who had no compassion for anyone less powerful than himself. But somehow she thought that when she had killed that monster, the old Jeb would arise out of the ashes, so that she could be reunited with her husband and best friend: the smart, fun-loving over-achiever who had dazzled her all those years ago. Wasn’t that how it went in the fairy tales? You shoot the beast, and the prince emerges unscathed from the riddled corpse of the enchanted ogre. Only this time, when the ogre died, the prince went with him.
Eleanor Royden was beginning to suspect that no matter how pretty and charming and victimized she was, a happy ending would not be forthcoming.
Elizabeth was beginning to like the sensation of lying back on pillows while one’s troops scurried hither and yon, doing one’s bidding. This sense of power coupled with a complete absence of effort was proving to be very pleasant. Unfortunately, the attending physician had stopped by with test results and an evening examination, and he had pronounced her fit enough to leave the hospital in the morning. The quantity of arsenic in her system was relatively small, and she had reached the emergency room in time enough to receive treatment that kept her condition from getting worse. The doctor warned that she might have some joint pains and perhaps a few headaches or dizzy spells until the effects of the poison had completely left her system.
The members of the law firm had used the doctor’s visit as their excuse to leave, and they made their farewells, promising further news of the case as things developed. Edith swore to keep the doughnut explanation to herself, since it had no direct bearing on the case of Chevry and Donna Jean Morgan, and Elizabeth assured them that she would explain it all to them as soon as she saw them again.
The room was quiet; the lights were dimmed; and Elizabeth was now alone with her mother, who was determined to sit by the bedside of her ailing off-spring.
“You didn’t give me a task, dear,” she reminded the patient.
“I saved a hard one for you, Mother,” said Elizabeth solemnly.
“Really? And what is that?”
“Don’t you think someone should notify Daddy that I’m in the hospital?”
“Oh, my, your father. I’d forgotten all about him.”
“So it seems,” Elizabeth remarked, with a glance toward the closed door. “Would you like Casey to come in? We shouldn’t leave her alone in the hall.”
“Yes, of course.” Margaret MacPherson hesitated. “You know, dear, when we heard that you were seriously ill—dying, for all I knew—I resolved to tell you something, if I ever got the chance. And now that you’re going to be fine, it all seems silly, but aft
er all I did promise your guardian angel, or whoever listens to mothers’ prayers.”
“In your case, I should imagine it’s Saint Jude, Mother.”
“I’ll just go and get Casey.”
Elizabeth tried not to imagine what new culture shocks awaited her with the coming revelation. Surely, no one was using the hospital visit to price sex-change operations, were they? Before she had time to raise her blood pressure significantly, Margaret and Casey appeared, and sat down in the two metal chairs by the bed. “All right,” she said wearily. “I’m under sedation anyhow. What is it?”
Margaret and Casey looked at each other. “It will all come out anyway when Virgil resigns,” said Casey, shrugging.
“True. All right. Elizabeth, I don’t necessarily want you broadcasting this about. In fact, don’t even tell Bill unless you think you absolutely must, but Casey—”
“Call me Phyllis,” said the small dark-haired woman, smiling faintly.
Margaret MacPherson nodded. “Oh, of course. Phyllis. Sorry. It has become a habit. Anyhow, Elizabeth, Phyllis and I are roommates.”
“Yes, you live together. I know. I came to your housewarming party. So?”
“You don’t understand,” said her mother. “Phyllis and I are roommates.”
“Not lovers,” said Phyllis Casey helpfully.
Elizabeth’s eyes widened, and her jaw dropped. “You lied?” she whispered. “You lied about your sexual orientation? About this whole political lesbian business! You lied? Why would you do such a thing?”
She was prepared to go on for several more minutes in the same vein, but Phyllis Casey interrupted her. “Actually, Margaret did it as a favor to me. Please don’t be cross with her. She was being extremely kind.”
“‘A little more than kin; a little less than kind,’” snapped Elizabeth. She only wished her cousin Geoffrey had been present to hear her riposte. Geoffrey, an amateur actor with an inclination toward Shakespeare, regarded barding as his chief form of recreation. Elizabeth admired his displays of erudition, but she rarely managed to find an opportunity to use one of the few phrases she knew. “What do you mean, doing you a favor?” she asked Phyllis Casey.
“Phyllis is an English professor at the local college. She has taught there for years, and because she has always been conservative and diligent, the rest of the faculty has taken her for granted. Lately, the department has become increasingly radical. First it was deconstruction, then it was multiculturalism—”
“They ditched Chaucer and Melville in favor of Comanche war chants and readings from the Bhagavad-Gita,” said Phyllis Casey, scowling.
“I see,” said Elizabeth. “And you were upset over this?”
“Disgusted is more like it,” Phyllis replied. “But what really enraged me was the notion that one had to be a radical to get any attention. Nobody cared about good teaching, or decent scholarship anymore. It was all show business. Who can be the most militant; who can make the most shocking assertions regarding conventional texts.”
Margaret MacPherson nodded. “I think what finally sent Phyllis over the edge was the course on the Brontes. The young professor who taught it called it Incest and Literature.”
Phyllis sighed helplessly. “It did upset me. He said some very nasty things about Emily and Branwell, without a scrap of evidence. Why, the National Enquirer has more credibility than that young swine.”
“Then the department started assigning all the upper-level lit classes to the flamboyant types, while poor Phyllis was left to teach freshman comp and all the other scutwork courses. She was getting ready to quit, but I told her that two can play at that game. ‘You fight back,’ I said. Didn’t I, Phyllis?”
The English professor nodded, looking a little embarrassed. “It really did seem to be the only course of action,” she murmured. “So logical.”
Elizabeth gasped. “You told them you were a lesbian?”
“Yes. I announced it at the next department meeting. And I said that as a militant feminist lesbian I objected to having courses about women writers taught by a member of the white male patriarchy who are our oppressors.”
“She meant the clown who taught Incest and Literature.”
“Yes. I did a good bit of reading to get the terminology right. My colleagues were stunned, I must say. They just stared at me, openmouthed, like the bowl of goldfishes in Goldsmith’s poem. So before anyone could recover I told them that I wanted to teach a lit course called Man-Free: the Creative Spirit of the Unencumbered Woman.”
“Let me guess,” said Elizabeth. “Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson—”
“Precisely.” Phyllis Casey beamed with satisfaction. “All the authors I had been teaching all along. As soon as I announced that I was a lesbian feminist, they gave me back all my old courses. They’ve all been quite deferential to me ever since.”
“How did you two pull off this scam?”
“It was quite easy, dear,” said Elizabeth’s mother. “Phyllis and I had already arranged to be roommates, because sharing the house seemed like such a safe and economical measure. But people are rather contemptuous of middle-aged women who are simply housemates, so we decided to spice up the act a little.”
“People believed you?” asked Elizabeth, still incredulous.
“You believed us, dear. I find that most people will believe anything that scandalizes them. And we never resorted to public displays of affection, or even to sharing a bedroom. People simply took our word for it. People seemed so eager to be tolerant and accepting of us that it never occurred to them to wonder if we were conning them. We were amazed ourselves at how easy it was.”
“It’s a pity we have to give the game away,” said Phyllis.
“Why? What happened?”
“Virgil Agnew and I are engaged.” Phyllis Casey smiled at Elizabeth’s look of astonishment. “You may remember him from the party. He is the professor of theatre and dance who was introduced to you as our token heterosexual.”
“Oh yes,” said Elizabeth. “He claimed to be in therapy for it.”
“He was. His psychiatrist pronounced him incurable, though, so he gave up trying to be like everyone else, and we started seeing each other. Last week Virgil proposed to me, and I accepted him.” She sighed. “I suppose I’ll lose my lit courses again.”
“You’re jilting my mother for a guy named Virgil?” Elizabeth demanded. “No, wait. I think I’m relieved. I think.”
Margaret MacPherson and Phyllis Casey laughed. “Really, Elizabeth, I’m delighted for both of them,” her mother assured her. “I think Phyllis and I were growing tired of the nouvelle cuisine crowd anyway. It will be quite a relief to close the show.”
“I had just gotten used to the idea of you two,” Elizabeth grumbled. “In fact I was rather pleased at having a mother who was in the forefront of modern feminist thought. You certainly weren’t the dull, conventional station-wagon driver I thought I knew.”
“I never was such a person,” said Margaret MacPherson. “Perhaps no one is. But for years we play these roles of unchanging reliability so that our children will have a secure and happy childhood. But perhaps you’ve had that long enough, and I can set about finding me again.”
A new thought occurred to Elizabeth. “Mother! Did you ever tell Daddy about you and Casey?”
Margaret MacPherson smiled. “Oh, yes, dear. That was the one bit of selfishness in my otherwise charitable gesture.”
“How did he react?”
“He now maintains that he became interested in another woman only because I had become interested in another woman. He blames Phyllis for wrecking the marriage, even though I hadn’t met her at the time, and his psyche seems to have taken an awful beating over the idea of losing his wife to a lesbian. I believe he’s seeing a therapist. Which reminds me, Elizabeth, how are things going between you and Dr. Freya?”
“Oh, all right, I suppose,” said Elizabeth. “I try to keep her entertained for my hourly sessions.”
; “But, Elizabeth, you’re supposed to be trying to feel better.”
“No, Mother. I am trying not to feel at all.”
In the darkness the water in the holding tank looked black, and the only sound was the soft slur of someone ceaselessly swimming. Miri Malone approached the edge of the pool cautiously, because no one knew that she was there, not even Rich Edmonds, who had been so supportive in her relationship with Porky. Rich was a wonderful friend, but tonight’s visit was too private to be shared with him.
Miri paused at the water’s edge, listening. It was nearly midnight, and there was a gentle wind, blowing cool night air in her face and raising chill bumps on her arms. It was a bit cool to be out in just a swimsuit, but wearing it had been force of habit. She really shouldn’t have bothered. All was quiet. No one was working late in the marine park offices, and no guards were nearby, although, since she knew them all, she was sure she could have talked her way out of any difficulty that arose.
Miri dipped one foot in the cold water and felt a shiver run up her spine. When the water was cold, it was best to plunge in quickly, without thinking about it too much beforehand. Perhaps that also applied to the other thing she intended to do tonight. She pulled down the straps on her bathing suit and eased it down her hips, wriggling out of it and tossing it aside.
That was better. Now she could feel the breeze all over. She swung down the metal ladder and into the water, calling out softly, “Porky! It’s me.”
A moment later a dark form glided up against her in the chilled water, butting the small of her back with his blunt nose. Miri turned and nuzzled the dolphin. “Hello, Porky,” she murmured. “How about a moonlight swim?”
She pushed away from him, playfully splashing his face as she plowed past. Porky, still wearing an enigmatic smile, waited a sporting minute, and then plunged after her, past her, and then in circles around her.
For several minutes they splashed and swam together, and the only sounds were Miri’s giggles and the rush of the water as their bodies churned. The Sea Park lights made patterns on the dark water, but Miri was careful not to swim into the patches of light. Finally she swam close to Porky, and determined that he had reached the proper stage of excitement.
If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him Page 19