If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him

by Sharyn McCrumb

Tanya Faith Reinhardt (Morgan) turned up at one. Swathed in a sheath of black chiffon, with a matching hat and gloves, she emerged from the backseat of her parents’ Ford Tempo, tottering a little on newly purchased spike-heeled shoes. Her parents, clad in Sunday clothes and looking ill at ease, trailed along behind her; Tanya’s mother was carrying a foil-wrapped pot of yellow chrysanthemums.

  Donna Jean, who had observed the mournful procession from her picture window, met Chevry’s second widow at the door. “I might have known you’d come late,” she said, her voice heavy with scorn. “Now that all the work has been done around here.”

  Tanya Faith tossed her head, causing her widebrimmed hat to lurch suddenly toward her ear. “Some of us are too grief-stricken to think about stuff like cooking and housekeeping,” she declared.

  “Some of us are too lazy ever to think about cooking and housecleaning,” Donna Jean replied. “Did you come to pay your respects?”

  “I don’t have any respect for you,” said Tanya Faith. “I’m here because I loved Chevry, and I don’t want you going through all his things and keeping the best for yourself. He wouldn’t want that. I know he’d want to see that I was taken care of.”

  “Oh, bull turds!” Donna Jean Morgan was oblivious to the shocked murmurs from her guests. This was clearly not how they thought a bereaved woman should behave. On the other hand, the provocation of meeting one’s husband’s other widow did seem to call for extreme measures. Donna Jean was no coward—you had to give her that. In the dining room, one woman murmured to another, “Todhunter blood.”

  “You think Chevry would want to see you taken care of?” said Donna Jean, with an unpleasant smile. “Why, honey, where he went, I reckon the lusts of the flesh drop right off you when you shed your earthly form, so I doubt if you cross his mind much at all anymore. Taken care of! Well, if you want me to, I can go out on the back porch and see if any of the old men out there are in the market for a sluttish extra wife.”

  In the shocked silence that followed her offer, Tanya’s father decided that it was time to stand up for his little girl. “Now, Donna Jean, you know that you accepted the situation while Chevry was alive. And now you’ve got no call to talk that way to—”

  “I have both the call and the right,” said Donna Jean Morgan. “While Chevry was alive he called the shots, because I had no skills and no income. I had no more say than his coonhound. He could ram this piece of trash down my throat and claim they were married in the eyes of God—the devil must be laughing over that one!—and I had no choice but to go along with it. Well, Chevry is dead now, so all that is over and done with. Now, you Reinhardts, listen good! As of now, this is my house and my land, and Chevry has nothing to say about it anymore. If you don’t want to be arrested for trespassing, you’ll get out of here right now, and take your trashy young’un with you.”

  Tanya Faith took the potted chrysanthemums from her mother’s slack grasp and threw them with careful precision at the newly vacuumed living-room rug. The plastic container shattered on impact, spilling clumps of moist brown dirt and severed petals across the ivory carpet. “Part of what Chevry left is mine by rights,” she said. “And, Donna Jean Todhunter Morgan, if you killed our mutual husband, which I reckon you did, then all of it is mine.”

  In her first act as investigator for her brother’s cases, Elizabeth MacPherson paid a morning visit to the Sutherlin House, Danville’s local history museum. The elegant two-story brick house, justly billed as the Last Capitol of the Confederacy (for one frantic week in 1865), was maintained with period furniture and exhibits related to the history of the house itself, as well as other items of local interest, such as maps, displays of crafts, and artifacts of area notables.

  Elizabeth knew that Lucy Todhunter would not be featured in a Sutherlin exhibit, because she did not represent the image of graceful gentility or successful capitalism favored by local preservation groups in their displays of regional pride. To outsiders, a famous murderess may be the town’s most celebrated citizen, but locally such a person is considered best forgotten.

  Once, in Fall River, Massachusetts, Elizabeth and her cousin Geoffrey had gone in search of a Lizzie Borden museum, or at the very least Lizziebilia, souvenirs in the form of tiny hatchet key chains or T-shirts announcing ACQUIT ME: I’M AN ORPHAN. The nineteenth-century ax murderess was, in fact, the entire reason for their visit to Fall River, but they soon discovered that interest in the infamous Lizzie was not encouraged locally. No signs assisted the traveler in finding the infamous house in which she had axed her father and stepmother; in fact, the house number had been changed and the building was now home to a print shop which did not advertise its landmark status. Elizabeth and Geoffrey had managed to find the house and they had retraced Andrew Borden’s fateful walk home from the bank on the morning of his death, but to their chagrin, they found not so much as a postcard commemorating Lizzie. (Geoffrey later remarked that he supposed there wasn’t going to be a Lorena Bobbitt exhibit in Manassas, either.)

  No, there would be no memorial to Lucy Todhunter in Danville—but Elizabeth was banking on the fact that some resident historian had been unable to resist the temptation to document the case. If so, the best place to look for an account of Lucy’s career would be in the basement of the Sutherlin House, where the museum kept a craft shop and bookstore, offering such locally printed pamphlets as In a Rebel Prison, or Experiences in Danville, Virginia by Alfred S. Roe, late private, Co. A, Ninth New York Heavy Artillery Volunteers.

  It was there. Tucked in between Recipes of the Confederacy and The Gibson Girl in Danville was a softcover chapbook of a little more than one hundred pages, bound in black construction paper, and featuring as its cover illustration an antique arsenic label complete with skull and crossbones. The book was unimaginatively titled: The Trial of Lucy Todhunter, Suspected Poisoner from Danville. Elizabeth picked it up and flipped through the first few pages for copyright information. The volume had been typeset and assembled at a local print shop, and its publication consisted of the author— according to the title page, one Everett Yancey— taking a stack of copies around to the local drugstores, gift shops, and other tourist-oriented establishments. The book, published in 1972, was in its thirteenth printing (at approximately two hundred copies per printing, Elizabeth guessed). This would be the perfect resource with which to begin her immersion in the Lucy Todhunter case. Elizabeth handed the clerk ten dollars for the purchase, thinking that there was nothing amateurish about the author’s pricing instincts. She hoped his research would prove equally good.

  “Is the author still alive?” she asked the smiling young woman behind the counter.

  “I hope so,” the volunteer clerk replied. “He’s our volunteer docent here at the Sutherlin House on Thursday mornings.”

  “Good,” said Elizabeth. “I may come back then and take the tour. After I’ve done my homework.”

  “HAVE YOU LOST weight?” asked Elizabeth MacPherson. Ordinarily that remark between women is tendered as the highest compliment, but in this case it was an expression of concern. A. P. Hill looked not only thinner, but also slightly green. Bottles of Maalox were lined up on her bookshelf, and a spiderweb glistened across the top of her coffee mug. Her clothes seemed a size too large. Elizabeth wondered if Powell Hill had accompanied Bill to any of their mother’s recent dinner parties.

  “I haven’t felt much like eating,” said Powell Hill, with an indifferent shrug. “The Royden case could put Julia Child off her food. That woman is impossible!”

  “You mean Eleanor Royden? In what way?” Elizabeth was being briefed on the case in her capacity as the official investigator for the firm of MacPherson and Hill. “Is the client unintelligent?”

  “I wish,” said Powell bitterly. “Stupid defendants are wonderful to work with. They do what you tell them, because they can’t think of anything else to do. You know the saying that a trial is like a chess game. Well, it is, but we lawyers like it that way, and we don’t want the red king to l
ook up and say, ‘Rook to Queen Three,’ while the game is in progress.”

  “But it’s Mrs. Royden’s trial,” Elizabeth pointed out. “Not to mention her life. Of course she’d want some input.”

  “She’s had that. She exercised her freedom of choice and hired me. Now she should shut up. Usually, even clever people accused of first-degree murder are as cooperative as the dimwits, because they are completely terrified. A silverback trial lawyer once told me that killers make the best clients, because they have too much at stake to argue with you. And, of course, most murderers are not overly intellectual, anyhow. Eleanor Royden is the exception on both counts.”

  “What has she done?”

  A. P. Hill reached into a drawer on the side of her desk and brought out a thick legal-sized folder. “This, for starters,” she said, passing the file to Elizabeth.

  “The Roanoke Times, the Washington Post, the Richmond Times-Dispatch…” Elizabeth let out a low whistle as she leafed through a sheaf of clippings. “This case is getting tremendous coverage. Eleanor Royden seems to be quoted a lot in these articles. Good picture of her!”

  “She made me take some L’Oréal to the county jail. And the local women’s group put her in touch with a beautician who went in and did her makeup before the photo session. I wanted a remorseful-looking defendant. I wanted someone who looked shattered about the fact that she had taken two lives. Eleanor looks like she’s trying out for Diane Sawyer’s job.”

  “She may get it,” said Elizabeth. “These are great quotes. ‘I should be charged with killing vermin without a license. How much is the fine?’ Oh, dear. And this one in the Post: ‘I’ll do community service at the Battered Women’s Shelter—if they’ll open a pistol range!’” She set the folder aside. “I see what you mean.”

  “I thought you would.” A. P. Hill reached for an antacid tablet from the candy dish on her desk. “She’s making a fool out of herself. Evil Eleanor, the Clown Queen of Crime. The media loves it, of course, and she thinks that means the reporters are on her side. She can’t see that they’re only using her to get outrageous, sensational stories, and that when they tire of her ranting, they’ll turn on her.”

  “I see. You’d be better off defending a sweet, timid, drab little woman with moist eyes and a catch in her voice.”

  “I dream about it,” said A. P. Hill. “When I sleep at all, that is. I envision myself defending Donna Reed, or Saint Bernadette, in a little navy-blue dress with a Peter Pan collar and sensible shoes. Once in my dream, it was Oliver North in drag, looking moist-eyed at the jury and saying he was terribly sorry. Anyone but Eleanor!”

  “It must be tough to dislike your client. Or do you, Powell?”

  “That’s just it.” A. P. Hill sighed. “I do like her. She’s bright and witty and tough. And I think that Jeb Royden was an arrogant monster who underestimated the temerity of his victim. I don’t condone what she did, of course, but I can see how she was driven to it. But she is making it very difficult for me to mount a defense. Every time I see one of those damned bumper stickers, I cringe!”

  “And you want me to find some people in Roanoke who will testify that she was really a nice, shy person before she snapped?”

  “You can try,” said A. P. Hill. “I doubt if we’ll convince a jury of that, but it’s worth a shot. What I really want is witnesses who will vilify Jeb and Staci Royden. I want all the dirt I can get on them. Every act of arrogance; every example of pettiness; anything that will make them seem like cruel, shallow people. Get the divorce records— start with that. Since Eleanor is behaving like a stand-up comic, the only thing I can do is to make the victims look worse.”

  “But they’re dead!”

  “I can’t help that,” said A. P. Hill grimly. “They’re still going on trial.”

  “You said to drop by if I wanted to pursue the matter,” said Miri Malone, with a smile that to Bill looked more like stubbornness than good humor. His mother’s housewarming party had taken place some time ago, but his conversation al fresco with Miri Malone had not faded from memory. “You know, about the connubial rights of dolphins?” she was saying. “My wanting to marry one, I mean. We talked about it at Casey and Margaret’s party.”

  “It’s not the sort of thing that would slip my mind,” said Bill, wishing that the city of Danville would arrest more jaywalkers so he wouldn’t even have to consider cases like this one.

  “Good. I’m glad you recall our discussion. There’s been a development.”

  Bill managed to look solemn. “You’re pregnant?”

  “No,” said Miri, scowling. “I wish I could pull that off, though. It would certainly strengthen the argument, wouldn’t it? But I shouldn’t have to. Men with vasectomies get remarried all the time. Procreation is not an issue.”

  “There’s a pun in there somewhere,” Bill pointed out.

  Miri Malone was not to be deterred by frivolousness. “I just went down and applied for a marriage license,” she informed him.

  “I’d like to have seen that,” murmured Bill. “How did it go?”

  “Did you know that you get marriage licenses in the Courts and Jails Building?”

  “Some people consider that appropriate,” said Bill, thinking of various divorce clients. “It does look a little grim, doesn’t it? All that concrete and smoked glass.”

  “I asked a man in a gray uniform where one applied for marriage licenses, and he grinned and said, ‘Upstairs. Right over the jail.’ Ugh.”

  “Next to the circuit courtroom.” Bill nodded. “I know it well.”

  “I went up to the long counter, and when it was my turn, I asked the clerk if I could apply for a marriage license without my fiance being present, and she wanted to know why he couldn’t come with me.”

  “And you said?”

  “Well, I thought about it,” said Miri. “I could have said that he is disabled, but if you’re a dolphin, it isn’t really a disability not to be able to walk, is it? In fact, for a dolphin that condition is quite normal. He might consider me disabled, because I can’t sleep in the water.”

  Bill wasn’t sure that his prospective client was the best judge of what constituted “quite normal,” but he nodded to speed up the narrative. “What did you tell the clerk?”

  “I said that my fiancé was unable to walk, and she expressed her sympathy, and I decided right then that I didn’t want to prolong things by misleading this clerical worker, so I just came out with it: ‘My intended husband is a person who happens to be a dolphin.’”

  “Well,” said Bill. “Well. I’ll bet Mrs. Mingus didn’t have an answer to that.”

  “No. She was looking sort of like a trout herself. Her mouth kept opening and closing, but nothing was coming out. Anyhow, she refused to let me apply for the license, so now we have grounds to sue the state for discrimination.”

  “You might have,” said Bill, trying to force his neurons into untried pathways. There are things that even the youngest lawyers cannot explain. “I suppose that—what’s the dolphin’s name?”

  “Porky. He may change it, though. That’s his tank name. I’m sure his mother called him something else, except it’s a whistle sound, and there’s no orthography for it.”

  “Porky, then,” said Bill. “Porky may have been discriminated against—if we can prove that he is entitled to any legal rights, but Porky hasn’t consulted an attorney.”

  “He has now. We want you to represent both of us.”

  “I’d have to”—Bill couldn’t believe he was going to say this—“interview him to verify that he wishes to go through with this.”

  “Fine. I’ll give you his address in Florida.”

  “I don’t speak dolphin!” Bill burst out, closing his eyes and hoping for an alternate universe.

  “You’ll have an interpreter. Rich Edmonds, who works at the sea park, communicates with their marine mammals almost as well as I do. I told him we’re coming.”

  “We?”

  “Of course. I’
m going with you.”

  On the next Thursday morning, Elizabeth MacPherson took a tour of the Sutherlin House, 975 Main Street in the historic district of Danville. She had spent the past two days in Roanoke, obtaining divorce papers for the Royden case and going through the list of the friends of Jeb and Eleanor, in search of friendly witnesses. So far it had been slow going. Several wives had agreed to speak to Elizabeth off the record, provided that they didn’t have to testify in court. She took them up on their offers, thinking that at this stage in the investigation, such interviews would provide useful background.

  It had been depressing work, though, listening to anxious older women. Surely, thought Elizabeth, I’ll find someone who is willing to speak on the record for an ill-treated woman, but the women she interviewed were either afraid to claim Eleanor Royden as a friend, or too put off by her outrageous lack of remorse. Perhaps, too, they were afraid of ending up like her. When two subsequent calls ended with the statement “I’m testifying for the prosecution,” Elizabeth began to wonder if Eleanor Royden had any chance at all.

  At least she didn’t have to worry about A. P. Hill’s case today. The Sutherlin House tour was a prologue to her chat with Everett Yancey, the local historian. She stood in the tiled entrance hall with a group of schoolchildren who were waiting to be shown around the mansion.

  At a quarter past ten, a silver-haired man in a cape strolled into the hallway, pointed his cane at the gaggle of youngsters, and drawled: “Those who chatter will be evicted from the premises. Those who wander will be censured. Those who touch things will be shot.”

  The students tittered nervously, and edged away from him.

  He nodded approvingly at their wariness. “How very perceptive of you,” he observed. “I am Mr. Yancey, your guide to the historic treasures within these walls. I am not overly fond of children tartare. I will answer questions if you can think of any, but I prefer complete silence so that the information that I impart can be heard by all. Let us proceed.”