If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Are you ready?” Miri whispered, pressing her wet face close to the dolphin’s smile. “Shall we do it?”

  She rippled the water with her hands and then turned over on her back, floating, her pale body shining against the blackness beneath her. “C’mon,” she said softly, and then she made the clicking sounds that are dolphin speech.

  Porky clicked back, bobbed a few times, and then swam on top of her. Miri held on, thinking that perhaps they should have discussed the precise acrobatics involved in such a union. She started to disengage herself, in order to be better prepared, but Porky showed no signs of stopping.

  “Wait!” said Miri, before a slosh of salt water silenced her. If she could just get to the side of the pool perhaps, and position herself against the ladder. But Porky’s masculine sensibilities were signaling full speed ahead, and he used his flippers to anchor her to him as he drifted downward toward the twenty-foot depths in the center of the pool. Dolphins mate underwater.

  Miri Malone’s last thought as she drifted into the chilling dark was that she had been right about men, but wrong to think that a change of species would make any difference.

  BILL MACPHERSON WAS celebrating his client’s release from jail and his sister’s release from the hospital by treating the client, the sister, and the firm to a celebratory lunch at Ashley’s Buffet, a restaurant much favored by Bill for its all-you-can-eat policy, which catered to both his appetite and his income.

  Elizabeth, still wobbly from her close encounter with the exculpatory evidence, was limiting her food to Jell-O and ice cream, for fear of causing a new bout of stomach cramps in her recently poisoned system.

  A. P. Hill sat hunched over a plain salad, still brooding about the impending murder trial of her own client, but Edith, whose appetite was never affected by the troubles of others, was tucking into her second plateful of roast beef and mashed potatoes, with assorted vegetables piled around them for variety. “This is what I call a party,” she remarked, between mouthfuls.

  Donna Jean Morgan chewed on a piece of fried chicken with mournful satisfaction. “This sure does beat the food they serve down at the jail.”

  “That’s all over now,” Bill assured her. “You’ve tasted your last meal from the county jail. All we needed was the analysis of the well water, which came back from the lab yesterday. It contained arsenic. Elizabeth was right.”

  “Of course I was,” she said.

  “Once I took the water sample in to the district attorney, along with several affidavits explaining how arsenic from embalmed bodies in the church cemetery had contaminated the well water at the old house, he realized that their case against you was weak, to say the least. He even acknowledged that there was a chance that you could be innocent.”

  A. P. Hill smiled. “They never actually admit that anyone is not guilty. District attorneys can’t afford to trust humanity. It would be bad for business.”

  “They grumbled a bit,” Bill agreed, “but I pointed out that the county budget could be put to better use than staging pointless trials against innocent widows, in the face of overwhelming technical evidence. In the end they conceded the point, and the judge expedited the paperwork, and here you are.”

  “It’ll be in the newspaper, won’t it?” asked Donna Jean. “I want the congregation and my neighbors to know I didn’t kill Chevry.”

  “I called them myself,” said Bill. “They may want to interview you. Channel thirteen might come over from Lynchburg, if you want a press conference.”

  “I’ll talk to them,” said Donna Jean.

  “You’re not going to move away, then?” asked A. P. Hill, who had thought that the local notoriety might be too great, even for one proven innocent.

  “No,” said Donna Jean. “I don’t know anywhere but here. Besides, Chevry didn’t leave all that much money. Reckon I’ll give some of it to Tanya Faith.”

  “You are not required to by law,” said Bill. He blushed. “I mean, I could look it up, but—”

  “No, I want to give her some,” his client replied. “I think she ought to go off to college. Maybe Chevry owed her that. Maybe she’ll get smart enough not to fall for some man’s line of talk if she gets educated.”

  “Speaking of Tanya Faith,” said Edith. “There’s bound to be some unpleasant questions if you do hold a press conference. Are you sure you don’t want to skip the publicity?”

  Donna Jean Morgan shook her head. “I welcome the chance to clear my name, and my great-grandmother’s, too.”

  An awkward silence followed her remark. Bill and Elizabeth looked at each other. Finally Edith declared, “You might as well tell her. She’s got a right to know, being a descendant and all.”

  “A right to know what?”

  “The whole truth and nothing but the truth,” Edith sang out.

  “Hush, Edith!” said Elizabeth. “Bill, I think I’d better tell her, since I’m the one who figured it out. Mrs. Morgan, you don’t want to mention your great-grandmother at the press conference. What they’re trying to tell you is that your great-grandmother, Lucy Todhunter, was guilty of murder. Technically, that is.”

  “Technically? What do you mean?” Donna Jean Morgan wished these legal types would learn plain speaking. “Either she killed somebody or she didn’t.”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth, who was wavering between sympathy for the murderess’s descendant and excitement over her discovery. “She did kill her husband, Philip Todhunter, but perhaps it’s just as well that she was acquitted, because the court would have had an awfully difficult time proving that Lucy had murdered her husband with a beignet. That’s a pastry covered with powdered sugar.”

  “Oh, that old doughnut,” said Donna Jean. “I thought they tested a bit of the one she gave Great-Granddaddy Philip, and that they hadn’t found any trace of poison on it.”

  “That’s true, Mrs. Morgan,” said Elizabeth. “The beignet contained no arsenic, which is why Philip Todhunter died. He had trusted Lucy to bring him his arsenic, and instead she brought him powdered sugar, and so he died.”

  “But there was arsenic in his system.”

  “Of course there was. Philip Todhunter was an arsenic eater.” Elizabeth had looked forward to this explanatory lecture during her own painful recovery from accidental poisoning, and now she was savoring the delicious triumph of having solved a mystery that had confounded researchers for more than a century. She had mentally rehearsed this summation of the case, and she intended to give it in fall.

  “He took arsenic himself, habitually, just as a drug addict might take heroin or cocaine.”

  “Why would anyone take arsenic?” asked Bill.

  “It was considered a stimulant,” Elizabeth told him. “It was supposed to give one energy, and— probably more important to someone with a young bride—it was supposed to increase a man’s sexual prowess.”

  “Oh,” said Bill. The four other occupants of the table, all female, were watching him with interest, so he directed his attention to the salad with rather more intensity than perhaps it deserved.

  “It was not an uncommon addiction among nineteenth-century gentlemen,” said Elizabeth.

  “It figures,” said Edith.

  “The problem with taking arsenic is that it is addictive, and it does enable the body to withstand larger and larger doses, so that an addict can ingest an amount of poison that would kill an ordinary person, but according to the article in Chambers, there is one fatal flaw in the habit of arsenic eating: you can never quit.”

  “Why not?” asked A. P. Hill. “Can’t you just taper off, until your body is no longer physically dependent?”

  “Apparently, withdrawal is so horribly painful, that few if any addicts ever succeeded in quitting. The article was adamant about one thing, though: you can’t quit cold turkey, because if you do, the last dose you took acts as a poison on your system, just as it would affect the system of anyone who ingested a large dose of arsenic.”

  “The last dose kills you,” muse
d Bill.

  “Exactly. So the arsenic eater has to take his dose of arsenic every day in order to stay alive. He also has to take it in solid form, by the way.”

  “I thought poisoners usually slipped arsenic into someone’s drink,” said A. P. Hill.

  “Yes, but that’s how you administer arsenic when you want someone to die.” Elizabeth shivered. “That’s why I got so sick from drinking the tainted water at the old house. Apparently, arsenic in a liquid solution goes to the kidneys and other vital organs, and can cause a rapid, painful death.” She touched her abdomen gingerly. “I can testify to the painful part.”

  “Arsenic eaters take their daily dose in solid form, then?” Bill held up a sugar packet between his thumb and forefinger, looked down at his iced tea, and tossed the packet down unopened.

  “Yes. And they take care not to drink anything for a couple of hours after ingestion so that the arsenic isn’t carried to the kidneys in solution. Arsenic addicts take their drug in white powdered form.” She picked up Bill’s discarded sugar packet and smiled. “It looks a lot like sugar.”

  “The beignet!” A. P. Hill had been listening to the evidence, and now she could see where the chain of reasoning led.

  “Exactly! According to the testimony from Lucy Todhunter’s trial, Philip Todhunter was in the habit of eating a beignet for breakfast every morning. His wife, Lucy, always brought it to him, and the pastry was always covered with powdered sugar.”

  “She brought him arsenic?” said Bill, whose appetite for dessert was rapidly disappearing.

  “Yes—he insisted on it. He was an arsenic addict, so the arsenic beignet would not kill him. On the contrary, it kept him alive. They both knew that he had to have his daily dose of arsenic to survive.”

  A. P. Hill looked thoughtful. “In that case it isn’t attempted murder to give someone arsenic.”

  “Oh, no,” Elizabeth agreed. “It was medicinal. The attempted murder occurred—and succeeded—on the day that Lucy Todhunter brought her husband a beignet covered with powdered sugar.”

  “Which he thought was arsenic.”

  “Of course he did! Perhaps he had been trying to stop his addiction. I don’t know. The guests testified that he had been ill for nearly two days, and that he had eaten nothing. Obviously, he had given up trying to do without his required dose of arsenic when he accepted the beignet. Lucy, whom he had trusted for all those months to bring him his daily measure of poison, gave him the sugared pastry, and he ate it, thinking that his pains would soon cease once the drug stabilized his system, but instead the pains got worse, and he said to her, ‘Why did you do it?’ Meaning, I think, why did you bring me sugar instead of arsenic.”

  “Why did she do it?” asked Edith. “I know you lawyers don’t set any store by motives, but the rest of us like to think that the world makes sense.”

  “Let’s leave that point for a moment,” said A. P. Hill. “I’m interested in proof. Elizabeth, how did you know that Philip Todhunter was an arsenic eater to begin with? Have you any proof?”

  “Yes. I first suspected that he might be an arsenic eater when I heard descriptions of him as a hypochondriac. His doctors described him as pale, with a clear waxy complexion. That description tallies with the addiction. Also, I knew that he had been in pain from injuries he’d suffered during the war, and I thought that some physician might have prescribed a tonic with arsenic as part of his treatment then. Arsenic was often used in patent medicines in those days. He could have built up a slight tolerance from taking an arsenic-laced tonic, and then later he might have drifted into a full-fledged addiction, eating pure arsenic.”

  “Speculation,” said A. P. Hill.

  “I haven’t finished, Powell. Remember that the doctors tested the uneaten part of the beignet and Philip Todhunter’s stomach contents for arsenic, and they found none. But during the autopsy, hair and tissue samples from Todhunter’s body tested positive for arsenic. He had arsenic in his system, but not in his stomach, and not from the pastry he ate on the day of his death. So, where did the residual arsenic come from? I realized that he had to have been taking it on a long-term basis.”

  “Maybe Lucy was administering it to him on a long-term basis,” A. P. Hill pointed out.

  “No. Otherwise, he would have been exhibiting the symptoms of poisoning long before that final illness. If the major were being poisoned without his knowledge, he would have had a history of gastric attacks, vomiting, lethargy, and all the other symptoms of systematic poisoning. But there’s no evidence of that. His last illness was sudden, violent, and unprecedented. The only theory that fits the facts is the one I gave you: Todhunter, an addicted arsenic eater, was killed because his wife withheld his supply of the drug, thereby triggering an attack that stressed his system so severely that his heart gave out.”

  “You still haven’t told us why she did it,” said Edith.

  “I know,” said Elizabeth. “If you think it’s difficult to solve crimes after a century has passed, you should try coming up with motives.”

  “Don’t you have any idea?” asked Edith.

  “Not really. I know there was some talk of his selling her farm, but that seems hardly sufficient.”

  “Motives don’t have to be sufficient,” said A. P. Hill. “People have been killed for the most trivial of reasons. Last July, a man in Vinton was convicted of manslaughter for killing his buddy over a tomato. That’s why the law doesn’t require good motives, only good evidence.”

  “So she got away with murder, why ever she did it,” said Bill cheerfully. “It happens, we all know that. And she probably lived to a ripe old age on her husband’s money.”

  “She died less than a year later,” Donna Jean Morgan replied, perhaps resenting any implicit comparison. “In childbirth.”

  “Oh,” said Bill. “Sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Lucy Todhunter was probably resigned to that eventuality,” said Elizabeth. “She had nearly died twice before with miscarriages. She’d had to go away for quite a while to the spa at White Sulphur Springs to recover her health. You’d have thought she’d stop trying to conceive.”

  Edith grumbled, “Some men won’t take no for an answer.”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth. “That’s true. They demand an heir. And apparently Major Todhunter was one of those brutal bastards, because he kept getting her pregnant as soon as she could walk again. Ugh. Poor Lucy.”

  A. P. Hill looked thoughtful. “I think I’d like to have defended Lucy Todhunter,” she said quietly.

  “But I told you, I’m sure she was guilty.”

  The lawyer nodded. “I know she was. I would have entered a plea of self-defense.”

  The next morning the triumph of saving one client had faded, and despite a slight hangover from overcelebrating, Bill was concentrating on his obligations to the other client: Miri Malone.

  “Maybe I should represent the dolphin,” he said to A. P. Hill, who was trying to drink her tea in peace.

  “I have a murder trial coming up, Bill,” she said in her most discouraging tones.

  “Yes, but you’re not working on it at the moment, Powell, so why don’t you just listen to some of my ideas for this civil-rights case?”

  In the outer office the telephone rang, but Edith got it on first ring, and the partners relaxed again and resumed their conversation.

  “All right.” A. P. Hill sighed. “I suppose I’d better hear it before you go public with it. Go on—you were thinking of representing the dolphin. Why?”

  “Because we’re not trying to transfer ownership from the Sea Park to Miri. We’re trying to prove that Porky is a person, and that no one should own him. Therefore, he needs his own attorney.”

  “Have you ever tried billing a dolphin?”

  “I see what you mean, but after all, Powell, money isn’t the first consideration. This could be a landmark case in animal rights.”

  “You might consider becoming a vegetarian,” his partner advised. “The question is
bound to come up in press conferences if you’re defending the civil rights of a dolphin.”

  Bill frowned. “I’m not defending cows,” he said.

  “Leave that aside for now, then. So, you’re planning to argue about the legal definition of the word person?”

  “Right. And I thought I’d bring in some expert witnesses to testify to Porky’s intelligence and his ability to communicate. My argument is that sentient beings should be considered persons, even if they’re not our species. After all, if we ever have to deal with any extraterrestrial races, this question will come up.”

  “I don’t think bringing up the possibility of flying saucers will strengthen your case, Bill.”

  “Okay, maybe not. Anyhow, what do you think of my argument?”

  “It’s interesting,” said A. P. Hill. “I can’t say that I can envision a local judge going along with it, but stranger things have happened.”

  Edith appeared in the doorway. “I’ve got bad news,” she said. “Do y’all want to finish your breakfast drinks before I deliver it?”

  “No,” said Bill, gulping the last ounces of lukewarm cocoa. “We can take it.”

  “One of your clients is dead.”

  After a moment of uncomprehending silence, A. P. Hill said, “It’s Eleanor Royden, isn’t it? I was afraid she might try to kill herself when she fully realized what she had done.”

  “No, it’s not Eleanor,” said Edith cheerfully. “She’s probably busy right now answering all the proposals of marriage that she’s been getting in the mail. No, the deceased is one of Bill’s clients. Miri Malone. That’s why I interrupted you. I don’t think you’ll need all that dolphin defense strategy.”

  “Miri is dead?” said Bill. “How? What happened?”

  “She drowned at the Sea Park in Florida.”

  “She drowned. But that’s impossible! She worked with sea mammals. She was a professional.”

  Edith handed him a message slip bearing Rich Edmonds’s name and telephone number and a scribbled message. “You can call him back if you want to. He told me that Miri Malone’s nude body had been found in the dolphin tank, and that the coroner’s office is calling it an accident.”