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

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!”