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

“No,” said Elizabeth. “Even if there had been, do you think I would have risked eating it? In a house where a man died of poisoning?” She began to cough. “Bill, could you pour me some water, please?”

Edith’s shouting made her head hurt even worse, and it attracted the attention of the nurse, thus suspending all conversation for several minutes while the visitors were ushered back out into the hall, and Elizabeth’s vital signs were verified and duly recorded on her chart. Even after the thermometer had been removed from her mouth, Elizabeth was unusually quiet. She was thinking about her afternoon’s research and about the one substance that she and Edith had not shared that morning: the drinking water from the Morgan kitchen.

Tanya Faith Reinhardt-Morgan had accepted a ride to the mall with two girls she knew from school. She had to get out of her parents’ house, and she didn’t have much of anywhere else to go. The two girls who invited her were disappointed that she refused to talk about her recent bereavement, which, after all, had been their sole reason for asking her along. As soon as they reached the escalator, they had wandered off to look at cosmetics, an indulgence prohibited by Tanya Faith’s fundamentalist sect (polygamy, yes; lipstick, no).

For lack of anything else to do, and lack of any money to do it with, she wandered into the video-and-pinball arcade to watch the teenage joystick pilots in action. As far as Tanya Faith knew, the Lord had not prohibited Pac-Man, or any of his ilk. She thought that the Lord might have done so, if He’d known about them, but as nothing on the subject had been handed down as yet, she decided to take advantage of the theological loophole and hang around, checking out the guys. As a token of her widowhood, she was wearing a black, below-the-knee-length summer dress with halter straps and a fitted waist. Tanya Faith looked quite fetching in black. She wished she could have worn lipstick, but the Lord was dead set against that, so she got around the restriction with regular and liberal applications of shiny, fruit-flavored (and tinted) lip balm-for medicinal purposes, of course.

“Hello, Tanya Faith. Want to try this?”

“Wh-what?” She was startled out of her reverie by a slender young man with dark hair and rather dazzling blue eyes. He looked familiar. Then she placed him: history class, the row by the window. She saw that he was offering her a brass coin.

“It’s a token,” he said patiently. “You’ve been standing there for the longest time, just watching, so I thought you might enjoy playing a game.”

“Oh.” She shook her head and blushed a little. “I wouldn’t have any idea how to go about it.”

“I could show you. It isn’t hard.” He looked embarrassed. “Unless you think you shouldn’t because of what happened. Maybe it wouldn’t be seemly to have any fun. You know, out of respect and all.”

“You mean Chevry?”

The boy nodded. His dark hair had a sort of lilt in the front, and his eyes looked even bluer up close. His name was Mike Gibbs-she remembered hearing him called on in class. He wasn’t one of the advanced-placement show-offs, but he wasn’t a dweeb, either. “Yeah, I guess the whole school knows about it by now,” he was saying. “It was in the paper, your picture and everything. Tough break, after all you went through with him. But I guess you’re lucky that old lady didn’t kill you, too.”

“Donna Jean? Oh, she’s mostly talk.” Tanya Faith was scornful of her rival. “And she’s going to jail anyhow.”

“So you’re back with your folks now?”

“Uh-huh.” She was looking at the flashing lights on the video game. On the side of the machine, there was a picture of a dark-haired young man with a sword, facing a dragon. “Do you think I could try that one?” she asked Mike.

“If you’re sure it’s okay,” he said.

“Oh, Chevry would want me to be happy,” she said quickly. “And I know the Lord wants me to go on with my life.” Tanya Faith’s greatest legacy from her late husband was the ability to determine that God’s will always coincided with her own inclinations.

Elizabeth had summoned everybody back to her bedside with that feeble air of authority assumed by many of the infirm. “I have jobs for all of you,” she announced. “Bill, I need you to drive back out to the Morgan house and get a sample of the tap water from the kitchen.”

“Couldn’t we phone the sheriff and ask him-”

“Do it, Bill!” Elizabeth was in no mood for debating with attorneys, particularly those who were her blood relatives. “And, Edith, I hope my purse and my belongings made it to the hospital along with me.”

“There’re some things in that metal locker,” Margaret MacPherson offered. “I know your clothes are there.”

“Good. Edith, see if my notebook is in there. I was copying down some information from a periodical called Chambers . If you can’t find it, you’ll need to go to the medical library and start over for me.”

Edith looked at Bill and A. P. Hill. “Are we calling this overtime?”

“Send me an invoice,” snapped Elizabeth. “It can’t be higher than my hospital bill, and I want some answers.”

“I was kidding!” said Edith cheerfully. “I don’t charge for playing detective. Just for typing and shorthand.” She opened the metal locker and began to rummage.

“Powell, you’re interested in history. Do you know Everett Yancey?”

“I think we’ve met,” said A. P. Hill. “He’s a local historian, though, not a reenactor. Why?”

“I was reading something interesting about arsenic. An article on the history of arsenic said that laws had to be passed prohibiting the use of arsenic in embalming fluids, because its presence could skew the results of an autopsy in murder cases. So, I started wondering when did they use arsenic in the embalming process?”

“Is that all you wanted to know?” said A. P. Hill. “I can tell you that. It was during the Civil War.”

“Why?” asked Bill, who was trying to think of some nefarious way for the armies to use embalming fluid as a secret weapon. Nothing occurred to him, though: dead was dead.

“Because they had a lot of bodies to contend with, and they were trying to find something that worked better as a preservative,” she replied. “Back in the eighteenth century, the recipe for corpse stuffing would have worked just as well on a rump roast: sage, thyme, rosemary. Undertakers just crammed a lot of sweet-smelling herbs into the deceased to keep him from stinking up the funeral. But the body decomposed at the normal, untreated rate, so burial had to take place quite soon after death.”

“Which is why a few unembalmed people in comas occasionally got interred,” murmured Elizabeth. “No chance of that, these days.”

“Right,” said A. P. Hill. “The preservative factor became an issue during the War Between the States, because soldiers were being killed hundreds of miles from home, and often their families wanted the bodies returned for burial in the local cemetery.”

“I wouldn’t want to be on a train with a stack of parsley-scented corpses,” muttered Bill. “Anyhow, I thought they buried soldiers right on the battlefield.”

“Some of them were,” said A. P. Hill. “But some bodies were sent home for burial.”

“Officers,” said Edith, who had found the notebook and was heading out into the hall to read it.

“That’s true enough,” A. P. Hill conceded. “Stonewall Jackson is buried in the cemetery in Lexington, a few blocks from his home. And Jeb Stuart is buried in Richmond. They both died of wounds, though, instead of on the field of battle. That might have made a difference, too. Anyhow, in an attempt to preserve the soldiers’ corpses long enough to get them home for burial, they started using stronger chemicals, including arsenic, in the embalming process.”