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

“Bill,” said Elizabeth. “It’s a long way to Danville. Hadn’t you better get going?”

“In a minute,” he said. “If you’re going to explain what all this is leading up to, I want to hear the rest of it.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” asked Elizabeth. “They put heavy-metal poisons into some of the soldiers’ corpses and sent them home to be buried in local graveyards.”

Bill blinked uncomprehendingly. “So?”

“In wooden coffins. Right, Powell?”

“Most of the time, yes. Why?”

“Edith and I saw some Civil War graves in that cemetery adjacent to the old house. I’ll bet some of them died a long way from Danville. A day’s ride would have been far enough away to warrant preservatives, though, especially in the summer.”

A. P. Hill looked at her partner. “Get going, Bill!” she said. “We need to get that water sample tested to clear Mrs. Morgan!”

“Will somebody please tell me-”

“Bill, the bodies were packed with poison, and buried in wooden coffins one hundred and thirty years ago. The coffins have long since rotted away, and the bodies have decomposed. Where did the arsenic go?”

He shrugged. “Into the soil, I guess.”

Elizabeth nodded. “And into the groundwater . The well to the house must be on the side where the cemetery is located. Fortunately the concentrations of arsenic in the well water are not large enough to be fatal in a single dose, but arsenic is a cumulative poison. I drank three glasses of contaminated water, and I became seriously ill.”

“I believe your condition is listed as fair , dear,” said Margaret MacPherson.

Her friend Casey said, “Oh, Margaret, don’t belittle her symptoms. If you can’t dramatize your own poisoning when can you enjoy ill health?”

“Thank you,” said Elizabeth. She reached for a glass of water from the bedside table, looked at it for a long moment, and set it back down untouched. “As I was saying, I drank less than a pint of the water, altogether. Chevry Morgan must have been drinking it for weeks in the evening while he worked to refurbish the old house.”

Bill nodded. “Donna Jean mentioned that he had been complaining of aches and pains. She thought it was a virus. She said that Tanya Faith had been affected, too.”

“Tanya Faith sometimes went to the house with Chevry to keep him company while he worked. But Donna Jean never did. She never ingested any poisoned water. Chevry, who worked there almost every night, drank the most. The concentration levels might have varied, too. Anyhow, sooner or later it killed him.”

“Donna Jean Morgan really is innocent,” Bill said wonderingly.

“Oh, honestly, Bill, I don’t know how you lawyers sleep at night,” snapped his sister. “Yes, she does happen to be innocent. I think we can chalk up Chevry Morgan’s death to the Confederacy’s score: a belated casualty of the Late Unpleasantness.”

“I prefer to call it divine intervention,” said Edith from the doorway. She was holding Elizabeth’s notebook and smiling.

“So Donna Jean didn’t use her great-grandmother’s recipe for husband poisoning?” asked Bill, trying to assimilate this new information.

“It wouldn’t have worked on Chevry,” said Edith, grinning. “Old Lucy Todhunter killed her husband with a plain old doughnut.”

“I thought so,” said Elizabeth.

Eleanor Royden was alone in her cell. She knew that later-if she ended up in the barracks of women’s prison-she might actually long for such isolation, but just now she was finding it difficult. Solitude had never been one of Eleanor’s favorite things. She liked parties, witty dinner companions, and the sound of friendly laughter. She and Jeb had given some wonderful parties in Chambord Oaks. Everyone had said that no one could match her for delightful dinners and a stimulating mix of people. Jeb had taken that for granted, of course. He thought that sit-down dinners for sixteen simply happened while he was in circuit court. Hell find out differently when he tries to entertain with the bimbo, she thought.

And then she remembered: Jeb was dead.

For an instant she wished he weren’t dead, because he would know which lawyer to recommend to take her case. (He would not have chosen A. P. Hill. Eleanor could almost hear him accusing her of making a sentimental choice at the risk of losing her case. But what choice did she have, when all of the lawyers he would have suggested were cronies of his who thought she deserved the death penalty?)

And he would figure out some sort of image to project to the public; Jeb was very good about managing his clients’ publicity. She wondered what he would think of her new celebrity: her photo in the Washington Post , an interview in Vanity Fair , and even a mention in Jay Leno’s opening monologue. None of this publicity had been favorable -she had to admit that-but at least she was famous. Her name was even on T-shirts.

It was quite a change from being the anonymous wife of a local power broker. Now she was somebody in her own right.

But Jeb was still dead. He would never know how important she had become; how cleverly she used her wit and charm to dazzle the press. He would never respect this new Eleanor, because he was dead. He wasn’t going to come to his senses, and give up Staci the sex toy. He wasn’t going to miss Eleanor, or ask her forgiveness.

In fact, if any consciousness of Jeb Royden survived anywhere, it was probably furious with her. Jeb Royden was actually dead. Eleanor thought it was amazing that someone as confident and powerful as Jeb Royden could actually be killed by a bullet smaller than a tube of lipstick. Such a big, loud, arrogant man, with his law degree, his Armani suits, and his friends in high places-and little, middle-aged Eleanor of the cheap apartment and the dead-end life had snuffed out all that magnificence with a thimbleful of cylindrical metal. Perhaps if she had been able to believe in his mortality, she wouldn’t have had to shoot him.

Actually, she hadn’t meant to obliterate Jeb Royden altogether. She had wanted to destroy the new Jeb-the pompous status seeker who had no compassion for anyone less powerful than himself. But somehow she thought that when she had killed that monster, the old Jeb would arise out of the ashes, so that she could be reunited with her husband and best friend: the smart, fun-loving over-achiever who had dazzled her all those years ago. Wasn’t that how it went in the fairy tales? You shoot the beast, and the prince emerges unscathed from the riddled corpse of the enchanted ogre. Only this time, when the ogre died, the prince went with him.

Eleanor Royden was beginning to suspect that no matter how pretty and charming and victimized she was, a happy ending would not be forthcoming.

Elizabeth was beginning to like the sensation of lying back on pillows while one’s troops scurried hither and yon, doing one’s bidding. This sense of power coupled with a complete absence of effort was proving to be very pleasant. Unfortunately, the attending physician had stopped by with test results and an evening examination, and he had pronounced her fit enough to leave the hospital in the morning. The quantity of arsenic in her system was relatively small, and she had reached the emergency room in time enough to receive treatment that kept her condition from getting worse. The doctor warned that she might have some joint pains and perhaps a few headaches or dizzy spells until the effects of the poison had completely left her system.

The members of the law firm had used the doctor’s visit as their excuse to leave, and they made their farewells, promising further news of the case as things developed. Edith swore to keep the doughnut explanation to herself, since it had no direct bearing on the case of Chevry and Donna Jean Morgan, and Elizabeth assured them that she would explain it all to them as soon as she saw them again.