If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “How noble of him.”

  “He was fed up. Anybody would be. She took out an ad on the Possibilities page of the Roanoke Times-that’s the dating section. It said: Prosperous Roanoke lawyer, long on financial assets, short on physical ones, seeks gold-digging bimbo to jazz up his briefs. Preference given to sluts named Staci.”

  A. P. Hill raised her eyebrows. “What did the happy couple do about that?”

  “They just laughed. Eleanor was becoming the town loony by that time. Everybody could see why he wanted to get away from her. But Jeb got even with her by donating their furniture to Goodwill, and giving her a check for half its appraised value as used household goods. About two hundred and fifty bucks. The stuff was brand-new James River furniture worth nearly twelve grand, but Jeb said he could afford to take the loss, just for the pleasure of hearing Eleanor scream about losing it. The next week he took Giselle to North Carolina and bought almost exactly the same stuff for their new home. Boy, was Eleanor steamed!”

  A. P. Hill stood up. “This has been fascinating,” she said. “But I’ve got to meet with my client now, Creighton. Before I go, let me give you one of these. A woman’s group in Roanoke had them printed up, and they sent me a stack.” She reached into her purse, and handed the assistant DA a red-and-white bumper sticker: FREE ELEANOR ROYDEN AND SEND HER OVER TO MY EX-HUSBAND’s PLACE.

  5

  LUCY TODHUNTER SAT at the defense table, swathed in mourning, but dry-eyed, watching the jury with a tremulous smile that widened slightly when the judge told them that they could not convict a defendant of murder unless they were able to work out how the crime was committed. In his summation for the defense Patrick Russell had said much the same.

  “Mind you, gentlemen, you cannot say that the defendant somehow managed to administer arsenic to the victim-you know not how-and is therefore guilty,” Russell told the jurors. “You must be certain beyond a reasonable doubt, when and by what means the fatal dose was administered. If you are unable to decide that-and I cannot say that the prosecution has been much help to you in the matter-it is your bounden duty to acquit the defendant, Mrs. Lucy Todhunter. It does not mean that you believe her to be innocent; only that by strict legal standards you cannot prove her guilty. In a court of law, we can be concerned only with whether or not the facts presented can support the verdict. The state of Mrs. Todhunter’s soul is the province of Almighty God, not the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

  “You might have shown more faith in my innocence,” Lucy Todhunter murmured as her attorney sat down.

  “Never mind what I think,” Russell told her. “It is the opinions of those twelve men that count. I hope I have left them little choice in the matter.”

  Apparently he had succeeded in this aim, for in less than an hour the solemn jurors, looking rumpled and sweaty in unaccustomed suits and cravats, filed back into the courtroom and resumed their places.

  “Gentlemen, have you reached a verdict in the matter of the Commonwealth of Virginia v. Mrs. Lucy Todhunter?”

  “Reckon we have,” said the foreman, a tobacco farmer, who later remarked that the formality of courtroom procedure made him itch. He handed a folded sheet of paper to the bailiff, who passed the verdict to the judge.

  His Honor peered over his spectacles at the message-lengthier than the usual jury decision. “It is unnecessary to explain your decision, gentlemen,” he said mildly as he passed the paper back to the bailiff. The verdict read: Not Guilty. We can’t figure out how she did it.

  Patrick Russell shook his client’s hand and formally congratulated her upon her victory. He sent her an exorbitant bill and never spoke to her again.

  As the crowds made their way out of the courtroom, Royes Bell turned to his fellow physician Richard Humphreys and said, “Now that Mrs. Todhunter has been acquitted of her husband’s death, in the interests of science, she ought to tell us how she managed it.”

  She never did, though. Lucy Todhunter went back to her late husband’s opulent home, where she remained, declining visitors, until three months after the trial-when a pair of events brought Lucy once again to the forefront of the Danville gossip mill. First, Philip Todhunter’s relatives from Maine arrived to contest Lucy’s possession of her husband’s estate; second, the young widow’s pregnancy became evident, despite the camouflage effect of the long full-skirted dresses that were currently in fashion.

  The Danville grapevine estimated the widow Todhunter to be about four months along in her pregnancy, and after considerable finger counting, they grudgingly allowed that the child was probably sired by her husband. It was just as well the jury hadn’t decided to hang her, everyone conceded, but impending motherhood did not endear her to the community. The Todhunter relatives were not impressed by this last legacy from poor dear Philip. They wanted the house, but not the heir, until attorneys for both sides pointed out to them that the baby would inherit a share in its father’s fortune.

  “They’ll get that house over my dead body!” Lucy Todhunter told her few remaining friends.

  They did.

  She was never a robust young woman, and the strain of pregnancy, perhaps complicated by the rigors of the trial, exhausted her strength. She went into labor several weeks early and died of complications in the ensuing birth. It wasn’t to be wondered at, said the matrons of Danville. Didn’t she have all those problems with her earlier confinements? She even had to go to the spa to recuperate. Her funeral was well attended, since those who forbore to speak to her after the trial resumed their friendship with her at the graveside. Her headstone gave only her name, the dates of her birth and death, and verse 15:51 from the Book of Corinthians: BEHOLD I SHEW YOU A MYSTERY. Royes Bell attended Lucy to the last and regretfully reported to his colleagues that Mrs. Todhunter’s secret, whatever it was, went with her.

  The child, a boy named after his late father, lived, and was raised in his Southern home by two of Philip Todhunter’s spinster aunts. The maiden ladies had decided that they preferred child raising in Southern prosperity to the status of poor relations in the homes of their New England kin. In time they grew accustomed to the conventions and the climate of Virginia, and they never returned to the North. Philip Todhunter, Jr., was raised with Calvinist strictness, and complete silence on the subject of his mother. He managed to fritter away most of his inheritance by the turn of the century, but he left a son, in whom no trace of the stern, cold Todhunters remained, in either accent or temperament. That young man, born in 1900, became a millworker, married a local girl, and lived in comfortable poverty, enlivened with country music, stock-car racing, and that old-time religion, a stranger to the ways of both his patrician grandmother Lucy and his ambitious grandfather, the murdered Major Todhunter-if murdered he was. No satisfactory explanation for the crime had yet been found.

  By the time Philip Todhunter’s great-granddaughter was born in 1940, the family was entrenched in the lower middle class, so thoroughly Southern nationalists that they would have been grieved to learn of Major Todhunter’s wartime affiliations. His murder was a dimly recalled family legend. Whether Lucy’s bloodline left a fatal legacy remains to be seen.

  DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR EX-WIFE IS TONIGHT? “Some of the local women’s group had that bumper sticker made up,” A. P. Hill told her client. “They asked me to bring you one.”

  Cackling with laughter, Eleanor Royden held up the sign for the guard to read. “Tell them I love it!” she said to A. P. Hill. A week’s stay in the county jail had taken its toll on her appearance, but her raucous high spirits were intact. She looked haggard now, and the lines on her face seemed deeper. The harsh prison shampoo had stripped most of the blonde from her gray hair, giving her a faded look that added a decade to her age.

  A. P. Hill rummaged in her handbag. “I brought you the Rancé soap you asked for. The guard said it was all right to give it to you. Would you like some special shampoo for tinted hair?”

  Eleanor Royden pulled down a lock of coarse gray hair and inspected it. “N
ot much point in that, is there? I think the tint is kaput. I must look like the prom queen from hell. I hope Jeb doesn’t see me like this.”

  A. P. Hill studied her client carefully for signs of disorientation. “Jeb is dead, Eleanor, remember?”

  “Well, sure he is. I spent three bullets making sure. Damn the expense of the extra ones, I said. He’s worth it. I just meant I wouldn’t want him to see me in case he’s haunting the courthouse or something.”

  “I don’t think that’s one of your problems,” said A. P. Hill.

  “Probably not. He and Mrs. Bimbo are probably haunting the Pinehurst golf course, or else they’re in Satan’s tanning parlor, getting a really bronzed look.” She chuckled.

  A. P. Hill made a mental note to deny all journalists’ requests for interviews with her client. Eleanor Royden was irrepressible and highly quotable. She could easily become so notorious that a fair trial for her would not be possible anywhere in the hemisphere. At least she wasn’t hysterical and frightened. Remorse in an accused murderer was a desirable trait, but A. P. Hill wouldn’t have wanted to handle a client afflicted with the loud, wet variety.

  “I brought you the bumper sticker in case you needed cheering up,” she told Eleanor Royden. “Apparently, the gesture was unnecessary.”

  “I appreciate it, though, Sunshine. I may not be sorry I shot those two reptiles, but being in this place is absolutely the pits. So, yeah, I think I needed a day-brightener.” She smirked mischievously at the young attorney. “Thank you for sharing, dear.”

  A. P. Hill winced, catching the sarcasm. “Don’t mention it,” she muttered. “Upon consideration, I’m not sure it’s anything to be cheerful about.”

  “I heard there’s another bumper sticker, too. A guard told me. One that says: Free Eleanor Royden So She Can Shoot More Lawyers!”

  “That’s definitely not good,” said Powell Hill. “If you become notorious, you might inspire a lot of jokes, and maybe some tabloid headlines, but the stereotyping is risky. If people see you as a cartoon Annie Oakley, they won’t feel any sympathy for you. If the jury decides that you are a pistol-packing vigilante, they will have no qualms about sending you to jail. Do you want to be famous or free?”

  “Can I think it over?”

  “Yeah, for about a nanosecond. This is the soundbite era, when broadcast news sums up an issue in a sentence, and you don’t get a second chance to project a favorable image. Nobody feels sorry for a gloating killer. What if the media’s take on this story is that Jeb and Staci were two tragic lovers, gunned down by a raging jealous witch? Or to put it in your terms, suppose the movie version stars Harrison Ford and Demi Moore as Jeb and Staci?”

  “They weren’t like that,” said Eleanor Royden. “They ought to be played by the Jurassic Park dinosaurs. Raptors. They were stupid, selfish, greedy raptors, and I was their prey.”

  “Your life depends on our ability to convince the jury to see them that way. If those twelve unimaginative people think you gunned down Harrison and Demi in Technicolor, they’ll put you away for a very long time.”

  Eleanor Royden considered this prospect. “I still think Sally Field ought to play me,” she said at last. “That’s my idea of a defense. What strategy did you have in mind?”

  “We need a plausible defense. I thought about temporary insanity, but that’s a very hard sell to a conservative jury.”

  “Good,” said Eleanor. “Because frankly, Sunshine, I hate the idea. I’m not going to stand up there and say I was crazy to shoot those two pit vipers. They tormented me for a couple of years, and they had every legal and financial advantage over me. I took it for as long as I could. Finally, the only thing I could use to even the score was my trusty nine-mm. Taurus.”

  “Let’s talk about the gun, then,” said A. P. Hill, abandoning philosophy. “It was registered to you. How did you happen to have it?”

  “For protection,” said Eleanor, shrugging. “I worked in real estate, remember? A couple of years ago here in Roanoke, a woman realtor went to show a house. The prospective customers robbed and killed her and left her body in the vacant house. After that, we all got nervous. I went down to the local gun store, and picked up the Taurus on the clerk’s recommendation. I even went to the shooting range a few times to learn how to use it. How to load, shoot quickly, fire at targets in dim light, and so on. I must say it came in handy- especially that last bit.”

  “No,” said A. P. Hill. “You must not say things like that. Haven’t you been paying attention? I want to see a woman pushed over the edge by mental cruelty, and now racked with guilt and remorse over what she’s done.”

  Eleanor Royden shook her head. “I’d have to be Sally Field to pull off that performance.”

  “I was afraid you’d say something like that.” Powell Hill sighed. “I want you to be examined by a psychiatrist. Will you agree to that, Eleanor? The medical evaluation might consider a defense that hasn’t occurred to me yet.”

  “How about Test Control as a Public Service’?” said Eleanor with a grin.

  A. P. Hill was not amused. “Will you talk to a psychiatrist?” she demanded.

  “I suppose so.” Eleanor sighed. “It would be a pity to spoil the festivities by going to an unsimpatico place like prison. I promise to behave. Now, will you get me some cigarettes and an Egyptian cotton towel, Sunshine? Benson & Hedges cigarettes, and a two-hundred-and-twenty-thread-count, undyed cotton towel. I’ll definitely go crazy if I don’t get some creature comforts around here.”

  “Good,” said A. P. Hill. “If you’re crazy, I can defend you.”

  Bill MacPherson had offered his client some coffee. Much to his consternation, she had accepted, forcing him to admit that cocoa and Earl Grey were the only beverages available in the office. “But I could run out and get you coffee,” he told her. “No trouble at all.”

  “I can’t stay that long,” said Donna Jean Morgan. She looked nervous to be in a law office, even one as shabby as Bill’s. She sat there in her shapeless brown dress looking like someone who is too polite to mention that her chair is on fire.

  “Well, I’m glad you stopped by,” said Bill. “I wondered how you were getting along.”

  She shrugged. “Tolerable, I guess. Things are about the same at home, but you can get used to anything after a while.”

  “You don’t have to get used to it,” said Bill, fighting the urge to raise his voice. Honestly, Donna Morgan was the modern counterpart to “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck.” “Your husband cannot get away with having two wives. Trust me on this. Here, I’ve written a couple of drafts of a stern letter to Chevry, explaining the errors of his ways and the possible legal ramifications. I wanted you to take a look at it before I type up a final copy for mailing.”

  Donna Morgan took the letter and read it slowly, blinking and whispering an occasional word aloud in her bewilderment at the intricacies of legal phrasing. “I’m sure it’s very nice,” she murmured politely, handing it back.

  Bill slid the letter into the Morgan folder, along with local newspaper clippings about the case and a few photocopied pages from law books. He could tell by Mrs. Morgan’s expression that she had not understood the contents. “In short, what it says is that we wish to warn Reverend Chevry Morgan that he is in violation of the state law against criminal conversation-that’s being unfaithful to one’s spouse. It’s actually illegal. I wonder if people realize that.” He broke off for a moment, thinking about MacPherson pere.

  “I never heard of anybody getting taken to court on account of it.”

  “Neither have I,” Bill admitted.

  “Mostly, they get shot,” said Donna Jean.

  “Yes, well, there are other ways of handling it,” Bill assured her. “The letter informs your husband that he may have broken several other laws as well as the one covering infidelity. It further states that if he does not cease his relationship with Miss Reinhardt, we plan to threaten him with legal separation, which will cost him support money on your b
ehalf, and we conclude by saying that we may bring the local law-enforcement people into the picture, to see if they feel like arresting him for anything.”

  “That seems harsh, Mr. MacPherson. Not like a wife ought to speak to her husband.”

  “Well,” said Bill, “you didn’t write the letter. I did. Lawyers are trained to be harsh. Most people who are willing to listen to reason don’t hear from us, and we have to be stern to get the attention of the rest.”

  “I don’t know if that letter will help or not,” said Donna Morgan. “You see, there’s been a development.”

  Bill clutched the edge of his desk. “Not another wife?”

  In spite of herself, Donna Morgan smiled. “No, sir. It’s just that Tanya Faith and me had a big fight the other evening, and she set Chevry against me, so he’s decided to move out with her.”

  “Your husband has left you?” Bill pictured a sensational divorce trial and wondered if he ought to invest in a new suit.

  “Not exactly left me,” Donna Jean replied. “He said he’d had a new revelation from the Lord, telling him that he wasn’t meant to keep two wives under one roof. Chevry says a woman’s home is like a hen’s nest, and that every hen has to have one of her own. He wants to give Tanya Faith a place that belongs just to him and her, and he’ll move back and forth between her house and mine, every other day, or some such plan.”

  Bill blinked. “He’s buying another house?”

  “No, but there’s an old one that belongs to the church. They bought it for taxes years and years ago, when they purchased the adjoining land to build the new parking lot. The old place was used as the original parsonage. It was built about 1860, same as the church was, but the church has been modernized through the years, and this place hasn’t. It’s big and imposing. I expect it was pretty once, but it’s in a sorry state now. Still, Chevry is real handy with tools and drywall, and of course he can get the carpeting wholesale, so he thinks he can put it to rights. He’s been working on it in the evenings after he finishes his day job. I’ll take him over his dinner and a change of clothes for evening services, and then he’ll go back and work another hour or two before bedtime. He’s been feeling poorly lately. I tell him he oughtn’t to overwork himself, but he’s burning to get the place fixed up so that Tanya Faith can have it.”