Sharyn McCrumb - If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

Dr. Royes Bell was in attendance at the time. His first thought was to summon Lucy Todhunter to her husband’s bedside, but as he reached for the doorknob another idea occurred to him. He turned away from the door and began quietly searching the room, easing out dresser drawers and examining each item. Ten minutes later he had checked every possible hiding place in the bedroom, even under the mattress, but he had found nothing. He decided to awaken Lucy Todhunter and beckon her to pay her last respects to the deceased. While she was gone he would have a look in her room.

Dr. Bell knew what he was looking for. When the sample taken from Todhunter was analyzed, he knew that it would show traces of arsenic in his system. Meanwhile, before he summoned the authorities, Bell hoped to find more evidence.

When Donna Morgan left, having exhausted the contents of the tissue box on Bill’s desk, Bill sat for a while contemplating the complexities of his new case. Then he went into the outer office to talk to Edith, the firm’s cut-rate legal secretary, fresh from the business college.

“Interesting case,” he remarked, trying to sound casual about it.

“Don’t tell me she wants a divorce,” said Edith, looking up from her typing. She settled her reading glasses on the top of her head and peered up at him. “That woman doesn’t look like she could support herself for more than ten minutes. What’d she do, win the lottery?”

Bill shook his head. “She doesn’t want a divorce. At least, not personally. She’d just like her husband to give up his other wife.”

Edith sighed. “You just attract them, don’t you?” she said. “They come out of the woodwork to be represented by you. Cranks, weirdos, refugees from the enchanted kingdom. I don’t know how you missed representing the Bobbitts. Are you going to tell me how this woman happens to find herself in the one and only harem in Virginia?”

“I’m not sure harem is the correct term,” said Bill, frowning. “Her husband is a backwoods fundamentalist. Apparently, he interprets the Bible in his own original way.”

“Yeah, I heard that saying about the devil citing Scripture for his purpose.”

“This fellow is a country preacher named Chevry Morgan. He has a little church somewhere in the western part of the county. Ever heard of him?”

“No, but I expect I will. The tabloids and the talk shows will be fighting over him in no time. How come he isn’t in jail, though? Or isn’t bigamy illegal anymore?”

“Technically, he’s not committing bigamy. He didn’t get a marriage license for wife number two, who is, by the way, sixteen years old.”

Edith considered it. “Kind of makes your father seem downright respectable, doesn’t it?”

Bill blushed. His father had filed for divorce the previous year, prompted by an infatuation with a twenty-something woman banker named Caroline. This evidence of midlife frivolity had been acutely embarrassing to the grown-up MacPherson offspring, but Edith was right: compared with Chevry Morgan’s creative lechery, Doug MacPherson was a saint. “Maybe I’ll mention that to Mother,” said Bill. “She seems to be getting back her sense of humor.”

“You’d better not mention it to A. P. Hill,” said Edith. “We’d never hear the end of this new affront to womanhood. She’d want this joker put under the jail.”

‘Why would those poor women put up with it?’ asked Bill. “I have enough trouble getting someone to go to a movie with me, and this guy-Would you settle for half a husband, Edith?” He added hastily: “And leave Mel Gibson out of this!”

“Seriously?” said Edith. “I can see a featherbrained teenager being flattered at the attention, and looking at it as a one-way ticket to being grown-up. And I can see an aging housewife with no education, trapped in whatever situation her husband cares to put her in. The question is: What are you supposed to do about it? Turn him in?”

“I promised Mrs. Morgan that I’d talk to him first. She doesn’t seem to want him put in jail, but she isn’t happy with the little threesome at home. Maybe I could acquaint Mr. Morgan with a few of the penalties for sexual misconduct. I guess I’d better do some homework on the subject.”

Edith smirked. “Would you like me to call and set up an appointment with Secretariat?”

“Not yet,” said Bill. “Would you like to take a look at this guy?”

“Are you selling tickets?”

“No. I thought I might go to church tonight.”

It was fortunate that Bill MacPherson’s budget for office decor did not run to hand-hooked oriental rugs. At the rate A. P. Hill was pacing his floor, she would have worn them out in a matter of hours. “It’s weird, I tell you!” she said, for perhaps the fifth time, punctuating the statement with a two-handed gesture of despair: palms up, fingers outstretched. “They have denied my client bail. Can you believe it? In a domestic case!”

Her law partner watched her with interest, feet up on his desk and a can of root beer poised ready to drink, except that he had to keep nodding in agreement to all her rhetorical questions. “Well,” he ventured at last, “she did kill two people, you know. A conservative would call that mass murder.”

“Domestic!” said A.P., waving away the issue.

“Uh-so was Bluebeard,” Bill pointed out. “And What’s-his-name in England, the one who kept drowning his wives in the bathtub.”

“George Joseph Smith,” said A. P. Hill, whose grade-point average in law school had owed much to her memory. “But he preyed on women for their fortunes. Eleanor Royden committed a crime of passion.”

“I don’t know how passionate one can be at six o’clock in the morning when the other party is peacefully asleep,” mused Bill. “To my mind the real reason the court is taking such a dim view of Mrs. Royden is the fact that she blew away a lawyer. Not a precedent they want to encourage.”

“Ha! Yes!” said A. R Hill, smacking her fist into her palm. “Craven attorneys. And I’ll bet a few of those old stoats have ex-wives somewhere in the background, too! They figure they’ll be next. After all, it wouldn’t do to give the ladies any ideas, would it?”

Bill considered the matter. “Well, since this is the state that hosted the Lorena Bobbitt trial, the Roanoke courts may feel that women have far too many thoughts on the subject of vengeance as it is.”

“Don’t get me started on Lorena Bobbitt,” said his partner. Indeed, that famous Manassas trial had been so thoroughly scrutinized and vicariously debated in the offices of MacPherson and Hill, that Edith, their legal secretary, had imposed a twenty-five-cent fine on anyone using the word Bobbitt on the premises. Henceforth, in deference to A. P. Hill’s Civil War ancestor, they referred to the case as the third battle of Manassas.

Quarters were duly deposited in the spare coffee mug, and the discussion continued.

“You should have seen their faces when I went in and said that I was defending her. You’d have thought that I had asked them for kitten recipes the way they stared at me in horrified fascination.

And then they started telling me what a swell guy good old Jeb had been.”

“He probably was, if you didn’t happen to be married to him,” said Bill.

A. P. Hill stopped pacing and glared in his direction. “That’s right. Stick up for him. Typical male trait: close the ranks. Crimes against women do not count.”

“Not at all,” Bill replied. “I did not know the man. All I’m saying is, if his only crime was to get a divorce and remarry, then it looks like Eleanor is a poor sport, to say the least, and there aren’t many courts who consider her justified in executing the happy couple.”