MacPherson's Lament

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Since you aren’t married, you probably don’t feel all the subtle overtones of this nightmare. For you, it’s just a parental breakup, regrettable, of course, but hardly traumatic for a post-college adult. For me, though, it’s something else again. I have not only lost my parents as parents, but also my sense of security in my marriage. I love Cameron, and everything between us seems perfectly fine-but is it? Can I ever really be sure of that? Does anybody really love anybody? And is it even possible these days for a relationship to last a lifetime? See, I don’t know anymore.

  If our parents’ marriage, which I thought was the ultimate model of a safe and loving partnership, is flawed, then how can I trust my own? If they can fail, so can I. Perhaps, since I was raised by their example, I don’t even know how to be happily married. Maybe I’m genetically programmed to fail. But I want my marriage to succeed. I couldn’t stand losing Cameron, too-not after all this. And the worst part is that I can never, never be sure it won’t happen. Ten years… twenty years… It’s no guarantee. Suddenly marriage seems less like happily ever after and more like a time bomb: you don’t know when it’s going to explode in your face, but you can be pretty sure that it will.

  I haven’t really discussed this with Cameron. He says I worry too much. I’m quite depressed about it all, though. I admit that. I’ve stopped bothering about job hunting. Now I just sit around the apartment all day, reading silly novels with happy endings. Cameron says that I ought to go home if I’m going to brood about it so much, but I can’t. This is one autopsy I simply cannot face.

  Love (whatever that is),

  Elizabeth

  “ Get there first with the most.”

  – GENERAL NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST’S ADVICE ON WINNING BATTLES

  CHAPTER 5

  BILL MACPHERSON SLIPPED out of his office and helped himself to a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker in the reception area.

  “I thought you hated coffee,” said Edith, waving a packet of NutraSweet, which he declined.

  Bill glanced at his office door, which he had shut behind him. “I do hate it!” he hissed. “This was an excuse to come out here. I just wanted to tell you that if there are any calls, please interrupt me. Anybody at all. Even a wrong number.”

  Edith raised her eyebrows. “I thought you were conferring with a client.”

  “You mean, as opposed to having a family reunion? I am. I’m trying to fill out the Petition for Dissolution of Marriage with my mother, but it’s tough going. I found myself looking forward to a call from Mr. Trowbridge. So feel free to interrupt.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Edith.

  Bill looked into the other office. The door was open and no one sat at the tidy oak desk. The sight did nothing to improve his disposition. “Where’s Powell? Isn’t she here yet?”

  “She had a date with Harry Wooding,” said Edith solemnly.

  “With who? Oh. You mean she’s at the courthouse.” Bill suddenly remembered that this was the name on the statue of a former mayor of Danville, situated on a landing of the courthouse steps. “Again? What do I have to do to see my own law partner?”

  “You might try getting yourself arrested. Did you see her on the six o’clock news last night?”

  “No. Was she discussing the murder case?”

  “Yes. She looked real good. Had on that new linen blazer she bought at the mall, but they ran a piece on the crime before they interviewed her, and it sounded like the guy was guilty. But she’s working hard to defend him. I sure do hope they’re paying her by the hour for this case.”

  “Well, maybe the publicity will generate some business. It isn’t as if we’re swamped around here.” He looked furtively at his office door. “I guess I’d better go back.” With a sigh of martyrdom, he went back to his conference. “Here I am, Mother!” he said with all the forced cheerfulness he could muster. “You’re sure you won’t have some coffee?”

  Margaret MacPherson sighed. “Caffeine is bad for you,” she announced. “I never drink it anymore. You ought to get in some herbal tea instead.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Bill promised. A month ago he might have argued the point, but now he thought his mother might need all the deference that he could muster. “Shall we get on with this form?” he said gently. “It’s just routine, you know, but as petitioner for the divorce, you and I have to fill in all the answers and file it with the County Circuit Court.”

  On his desk was the green loose-leaf notebook entitled The Virginia Lawyer, Bill’s legal lifeline into the intricacies of his new profession. He picked up his yellow legal pad and tried to decipher what he had written. “Now, where were we?”

  “We established that your father and I have both been residents of the state for more than a hundred and eighty days.”

  “ ‘… preceding the filing of this petition.’ ” Bill nodded. “And we had your age and county of residence. Number three is Dad’s age, place of employment, and county of residence. I’ll fill that in.” He scribbled more notes and consulted the form again. “Date and place of marriage?”

  His mother twisted her hands in her lap and looked away. “August 23, 1961. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We eloped. My sister Amanda was furious with me. She had her heart set on a pastel-pink formal wedding, but I-well, it doesn’t matter now. Go on to the next one.”

  Bill picked up the form and read aloud, “ ‘Parties ceased co-habiting as husband and wife as of (insert date here), and separated and ceased living together as husband and wife on (insert date here.)’ ” He was careful not to look up from the paper as he finished reading.

  After a palpable silence, Bill’s mother said, “He moved out two weeks ago, wasn’t it? On a Saturday.”

  “Uh-yes,” muttered Bill. “That’s the ceased-living-together part. I’ll need a date for the other one, too.”

  “Could I have some of that coffee now?” asked Margaret MacPherson.

  Nathan Kimball had spent most of the past two days boning up on Virginia real estate law and double-checking his client’s proposed purchase. While he was thus occupied with legal business, John Huff spent his time playing tourist, although what he could have found to view after the first hour was a mystery to his attorney.

  Huff drove his rental car out to Lucktown, north of Danville, to look at a historical marker on the site of the old railroad depot. Rejecting Bill MacPherson’s suggestions of various local motels, he took rooms for himself and his attorney in an ornate Queen Anne-style bed and breakfast on the elegant section of Main Street known locally as Millionaire’s Row. He took long walks in the warm June sunshine, admiring the late Victorian houses that line Danville’s grandest old thoroughfare. In these graceful old mansions the city’s tobacco and textile barons had entertained each other-and even generated a bit of minor history. On the corner of Main and Broad streets was the birthplace of the Langhorne sisters; Nancy became Viscountess Astor, the first woman to sit in Britain’s House of Commons, and her sister Irene became the model for the Gibson Girl, created by her artist-husband, Charles Dana Gibson.

  Huff spent a good bit of time in one of the oldest houses on Main Street, once the residence of William T. Sutherlin and now the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History. For a week in April 1865, the massive gray sandstone building topped with a glass cupola had been the last capitol of the Confederacy, sheltering Jefferson Davis and his cabinet after the fall of Richmond. Huff wandered around the rooms of restored Victorian furnishings, with plaster ceiling work and its elaborately carved furniture. He told the curator that he was thinking of buying an antebellum home, and that he needed ideas on how to decorate it. However, he spent a good bit of time reading Jefferson Davis’s last speech, penned in the drawing room. And he asked if there were any local memoirs dating from the Civil War in the library upstairs. He paid scant attention to the displays of quilts and local artwork in the basement of the museum, but he was most interested in finding out whether there had been any additions to the house in modern times-and
where outbuildings had stood a century before.

  When Nathan Kimball returned to the bed and breakfast at four o’clock, he found Mr. Huff sitting in the chair by the window reading local-history pamphlets with the air of someone studying for an exam. He looked up as the door opened. “Well?”

  Kimball, who had long given up expecting courtesy from his client, ignored the brusqueness of the salutation. “Everything seems to check out,” he said, loosening his tie as he sat down on the bed. “Though, of course, if you were relying on bank financing, they’d want to do everything about three times, just to make sure. Still, I’ve looked over MacPherson’s paperwork-title search, the terms of the deed, and so on. The house was left as a trust for the widows and daughters of Confederate veterans, but there was a clause stating that the board-that is, the residents and their attorney-could dispose of the house if it was no longer needed for its original purpose. I think it’s safe to assume that there won’t be any more widows or daughters turning up at this late date.”

  “Not after a hundred and thirty-odd years,” Huff agreed.

  “I mentioned that we were thinking of offering a million two, and he said he’d talk to his clients, but that he thought that they’d wait for other offers in that case. Apparently they have received other responses to their ad.”

  Huff narrowed his eyes. “On whose authority did you offer them less than the asking price?”

  “Well, I didn’t think you’d mind,” stammered Kimball. “I thought I might save you some money, since the sellers seem to be in a hurry, and you once said you expected a discount for cash.”

  “Tell MacPherson we’ll meet their price. But we want to close tomorrow.”

  The walk from the law office to the police station took A. P. Hill up Loyal Street, past an old tobacco warehouse that was once Confederate Prison No. 6. Sometimes she would linger, looking at the old building, remembering the harrowing account she had read of conditions in Danville’s military prisons. Today, though, her thoughts were on the more modern version of prison in Danville: the jail in which Tug Mosier awaited trial, unable to make bail.

  She had examined the police reports about the murder of Misti Hale, but the results seemed inconclusive. They had been unable to locate any of Tug’s drinking buddies from the evening in question, and no witnesses saw him or anyone else enter his home that night. Misti Hale had been strangled, and there was no physical evidence-hairs, fingerprints, or anything else-to identify her killer. The evidence against Tug Mosier was circumstantial, but as she had learned in law school, many a man has been hanged on circumstantial evidence. (Well, been electrocuted, then, since this was Virginia.) If the prosecutor could find a motive or convince a jury that he had planned the crime in advance, he could be convicted of capital murder. In theory, Powell Hill did not disapprove of the death penalty, but in practice, she didn’t want to feel eternally responsible if her client paid the extreme penalty because her defense was not adequate.

  Tug Mosier’s past did not help matters either. As his attorney, Powell could not present him to a jury as an upstanding citizen who had accidentally fallen under suspicion of a crime through no fault of his own. Mosier was an eleventh-grade dropout whose checkered job record seldom showed anything lasting longer than a year or paying more than minimum wage. He came from a broken home and had run away from his grandmother’s care by the time he was fifteen. The grandmother had been dead for years now, and apparently there was no one else who cared what happened to Tug Mosier.

  He had a string of run-ins with the law that stretched all the way back to junior high school: throwing bricks off the overpass and trying to hit passing cars. From there he progressed to drunk driving, assault charges for barroom fights, and an occasional larceny or bad-check charge. He had served time in various county jails, but never in prison. All in all, his criminal record presented a picture of an irresponsible man lacking in ambition and self-control, one with a penchant for violence-just the sort of man who could have killed Misti Hale in a drunken argument. Worst of all, Tug Mosier was not even proclaiming his innocence; all he could offer was a reasonable doubt about his own guilt. Powell Hill wondered if she could persuade a jury to give him the benefit of that doubt, considering his record.

  The television news story last night hadn’t helped, either. The news team had begun with a shot of an unshaven Tug Mosier, dressed in jeans and an undershirt, leering at the camera. Then they had cut to an interview with the grieving family of Misti Hale. They looked as worthy and upstanding as the Waltons, expressing their sorrow in dignified tones. Misti had been the wayward daughter of a well-liked local pediatrician. Dr. Hale’s colleagues, friends, and former patients would naturally be outraged by the murder of his pretty daughter. Powell could imagine the television audience chanting: Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! The story made headlines in the morning paper, too. She wondered if there was anybody left in Danville who didn’t think that Tug Mosier was a human pit bull.

  A. P. Hill had walked another half block before that thought came around again, and this time she really considered its implications. Would there be local prejudice in the case? Enough to jeopardize her client’s right to a fair trial? She decided that before she went back to talk to Tug, she’d better go to the courthouse and find a Silverback. She had to find out how to go about getting a change of venue for Tug Mosier’s murder trial.

  Bill MacPherson was up to his ears in tedious paperwork and silence was worth four dollars a minute, so naturally the phone rang. The trill of the bell so close to his ear annoyed him so much that he snatched it up at once, forgetting about Edith in the outer office.

  “Hello! MacPherson and Hill.”

  “Is that you, Bill?” The drawling tones of an elderly voice froze Bill as he sat gripping the phone. “I just had a little question. Thought I’d put you on it.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” he managed to say. “How are you, Mr. Trowbridge?”

  “Oh, I can’t complain.” I’ll bet you can, thought Bill. “Well, here’s my question. Have you got a pencil handy to jot this down?”

  “Ready when you are,” said Bill, striving to keep a note of impatience out of his voice.

  “Well, I was just wondering. I was watching a cop show on television last night. Suppose a policeman arrested a guy who had a fake ID. Say he was calling himself Fred Jones when his real name was Bob Brown. So the arrest papers and everything will be made out in the phony name. Can the guy go all the way through the trial and sentencing and then produce identification to say who he really is, then claim that the charges don’t apply to him because he was misidentified? Can he tell them to go find somebody named Fred Jones and put him in jail? Can he do that?”

  Bill blinked. “No. We didn’t cover that in law school, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t work. You may be able to outsmart the state, but not as easily as that. I suppose you want me to check on it formally, though.”

  “Sure, I’d like to know exactly why it wouldn’t work. You could look it up.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I’ll see what I can do.” Bill sighed. “Give me a couple of days. I’ll call you back.”

  “That’s fine,” said Trowbridge cheerfully. “You know, this is a lot of fun. It’s one of the best presents the wife has ever come up with.”

  What did she give you last year? thought Bill. A thumbscrew? Aloud he said, “I’ll be in touch, Mr. Trowbridge. Goodbye.”

  The next time the phone rang, about two minutes later, Bill had no trouble remembering to let Edith answer it. Seconds later she appeared in the doorway. “Nathan Kimball for you,” she said. “Good luck.”

  Bill motioned for her to stay. “Yes?” he said into the phone. “Yes, this is he… All right… Yes, I understand… Tomorrow? But that’s a lot of paperwork… I see. Well, if you put it that way. I suppose we could-I’ll tell my clients and call you back. Ten minutes or so… Good. Until then.” He hung up the phone with a bemused smile. “You want the good news, Edith, or the bad news?”

>   “Give me the good news,” said Edith. “It’ll make a nice change.”

  “Mr. Huff has decided to buy the Home for Confederate Women. His lawyers have okayed the deal, and he’s willing to pay the asking price without any quibbling.” Bill looked smug. “I mentioned that there had been other inquiries.”

  “You mean the old guy who wanted to see it if we’d trade it for $65,000 and a trailer at Virginia Beach?”

  “Well, it was an offer of sorts,” said Bill.

  “Okay. The good news is Mr. Huff will buy the house for the asking price. And the bad news is-what? He wants to pay it in Confederate money?” asked Edith.

  “No. The bad news is that we have to close the deal tomorrow.”

  Edith sneered. “That’s impossible. When my brother bought his house, it liked to have taken forever.”

  “That was because he needed bank financing,” Bill told her. “Mortgages do take forever. But if Mr. Huff is paying cash-well, not cash, but transferring funds from his bank to ours, without borrowing any money from anyone-then all we have to do is the paperwork.”

  “That must be the bad news,” said Edith. “That’s a lot of documents to generate in one day’s time. I suppose you’ll be wanting me to cancel my evening’s plans and work overtime.”

  “I really need you,” said Bill. “But we’ll be able to afford to pay you overtime from our commission from the sale of the house.”