If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

3

PHILIP TODHUNTER LINGERED in agony all the rest of that day, alternately vomiting and lying in a stupor. After a three-hour vigil in which the patient showed no improvement, Dr. Humphreys insisted on calling in another physician, Royes Bell, to offer another opinion on what should be done. “I don’t mind telling you that the situation is very grave,” he told the anxious Lucy, “If we cannot discover what your husband has taken, I see no hope for his recovery.”

Lucy Todhunter raised her head and said in a firm, clear voice, “He has taken nothing. Only the breakfast pastry that I have given him. We all ate one this morning.”

“Yet no one else is ill,” murmured Humphreys. “Only Mr. Todhunter.”

Later, when Lucy went out of the room to fetch hot water and fresh towels, Dr. Humphreys left the side of his sleeping patient and began to search the room. He had abandoned this task, and was making notes of the symntoms, when Dr. Bell appeared, puffing from the exertion of the stairs. Elderly Royes Bell, who had seen hell on earth as a surgeon in the Army of Northern Virginia amputating limbs without morphia and watching soldiers die of fever for want of pennies’ worth of medicine, was a jovial man who kept his nightmares to himself. He was as round and solid as his name implied and he was revered by the townspeople, who had absolute faith in his expertise.

He shuffled over to the bed and put a hand on his colleague’s shoulder. “What do we have here, Humphreys?”

Richard Humphreys glanced at Lucy Todhunter lingering in the doorway. “Mrs. Todhunter, I wonder if we might have some coffee brought up for Dr. Bell and myself.” When she had gone, he said in a low voice, “This gastric attack is sudden and severe, but by all accounts the patient has eaten next to nothing. I may as well tell you at the outset that I broached the subject of poison with Mrs. Todhunter straight out. She denied it.”

“Well, she would,” said Bell with a grim smile. “Better get your facts first. Have you collected samples for testing?”

“Yes.”

“Then I suggest that we do what we can for this poor man-and leave the accusations until we know something. Have you questioned the patient?”

Humphreys nodded. “As best I could in his condition. I told him that he was on the point of death and that I must know what to treat him for. Whereupon, he looked at Mrs. Todhunter, and said, ‘Lucy, why did you do it!’ He has not spoken coherently since.”

Royes Bell pulled up a brocaded satin chair and lowered his bulk into it. He grasped Todhunter’s wrist and felt for a pulse. “So he thinks that his good lady poisoned him, does he?”

Dr. Humphreys hesitated. “He seemed urgent, but not angry. It isn’t the tone of voice that I should have used to a murderous spouse. Perhaps he was delirious, after all.”

Bell completed his examination of the patient. “Well, if the lady did poison him, Humphreys, I hope she wasn’t stingy with the dosage. I think the best we can wish this poor devil is that it be over quickly for him.”

Philip Todhunter lingered three more days, his stupor punctuated with retching and pain-racked delirium. Finally, at dawn on the fifth day of his illness, he slipped into a last, quiet sleep from which he never awakened. Lucy Todhunter was not present at the bedside when her husband passed away. Worn-out from nearly a week of ministering to the dying man, she had retired to her bedroom shortly after midnight for her first real sleep in days.

The doctors had taken turns keeping watch over Todhunter, although there had been little that they could do in the way of treatment. On the second day Humphreys had administered injections of brandy, since Todhunter was too weak to take it orally. This seemed to make the sick man rest easier, but it did not counteract his decline. He took no nourishment. At her cousin’s insistence, Lucy and the housekeeper applied mustard plasters to Philip’s chest-to no avail. For want of any other remedy, Humphreys administered nux vomica, a preparation of white arsenic and carbonate of potash, used in treating dyspepsia. This, too, had no effect. Death finally came when Todhunter’s body was too weakened by pain and vomiting to withstand further rigors. His heart simply gave out.

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.”

“But you haven’t heard anything yet, Bill! This poor woman went through two years of hell. Imagine being married to a razor-sharp, reptilian attorney who equates legal cases with chess games.”

“Yes, yes, I am imagining it,” said Bill, grinning. “And a lovely bride you’d make, too, Amy dear.”

She made a face at him. “No, seriously. You devote twenty years of your life to being the perfect little wife, a small grace note to his magnificence, and then one day he replaces you with a newer model. And instead of pensioning you off as decency and fairness-if not sentiment-require, he decides to turn the divorce into a legal Super Bowl.”

“And she has to be the Buffalo Bills, I suppose?”

“No. She’s the guy whose ticket was stolen and who didn’t even get to see the game. Nobody in town would take her divorce case. Two different guys from other counties signed on, and then mysteriously quit. She couldn’t get a change of venue to some other town, because everyone who had a say in the matter was a friend of Good Old Jeb. He used every trick in the book to hide his assets. He had all their furniture and household goods moved out of their house and put into storage, pending the settlement.”

“Furniture? What for?”

“Because she didn’t have any money to replace it! He just went out and bought all new stuff. Poor Eleanor couldn’t afford to do that. He even took the Waterford crystal and the silverware that had been left to Eleanor by her grandmother, and when she tried to go to the storage place to get it back, Jeb Royden had her arrested for trespassing.”

Bill shook his head. “It doesn’t ring true,” he said. “Mother and Dad weren’t like that. Why would Royden be so vindictive toward his own wife?”

“I asked her that!” said Powell Hill triumphantly. “She said that Jeb was so used to getting his own way that he couldn’t believe she was putting up a fuss about the divorce. He thought she should just submit meekly to whatever decision he made-and take whatever he chose to give her. When she made a fuss about it, he turned nasty. Then he decided to use all his legal skills to punish her. I have to document all the details of this for the defense. It’s a very depressing case.”

“I don’t know,” said Bill. “It makes me feel better.”

“Why?”

“It gives me a new perspective on my parents’ situation. Now I realize how much worse things could have been.”

“Don’t relax yet,” said Powell Hill. “The Roydens’ divorce went through more than a year ago, but she only shot him yesterday. Your mother may still be simmering.”

The small white frame church sat back from the road like a humpbacked Brahma bull, glowering at the world through eyes of crimson glass. The building was old, and it had once been a fine, but simple country church. Through the years jackleg carpenters had remodeled it to add plumbing and electricity, and to cover the weathered exterior with aluminum siding and the cracking plaster walls with cheap paneling, and the result was a serviceable structure without a scrap of grace. The old cemetery that formed a semicircle around the structure had a certain somber beauty, but otherwise the building and its surroundings, hemmed in by scrub pines and weedy locust trees fringing a gravel parking lot, completed the picture of an edifice that only God could love.

Bill MacPherson edged his shabby blue Tempo between a couple of battered pickup trucks. A single streetlight glowed above the parking lot, illuminating the dents in the aging vehicles and silhouetting the gun racks in the truck cabs. “I don’t think we look too out of place,” he said, looking approvingly at the faded Fords and Chevys lined up in front of them.

“No,” said Edith, slamming her door. “This clunker of yours can match rust spots with the best of them.”

“I drive this car as a safety precaution,” said Bill. “It deters thieves.”

“You couldn’t pay one to steal it, if that’s what you mean,” Edith replied. “But it is useful for undercover work. If anyone suspected that this car belonged to an attorney, applications to law schools would plummet.” She eyed him critically. “I’m not so sure about your clothes, though.”

“What’s wrong with them?” asked Bill, straightening his burgundy silk tie. “This is what I always wear to church. Navy blazer, khaki pants, blue oxford-cloth shirt. A suit would be more formal, I know, but it’s only a Tuesday-night service. Don’t I look all right?”

“Call it a hunch.” Edith, who was in a shapeless polyester dress, shrugged. “But I think you’re going to look like a peacock in a birdbath.”

“Maybe I should have brought my raincoat,” said Bill, loosening his tie and glancing nervously at the closed church door illuminated by a single yellow bug light. “We’ll sit in the back row and try to stay inconspicuous.”

“Just watch me,” said Edith, heading for the door. “I grew up in a little church like this one. Don’t genuflect. Don’t kneel. Don’t put your MasterCard in the collection plate. And if somebody starts passing around a little wooden box with a metal latch, don’t take it.”

“Why not?” asked Bill. “What would they have in a little wooden box?”

Edith opened the door and slipped inside. “Rattlesnakes,” she whispered. She slid into a wooden pew to the right of the door, pulling Bill’s sleeve to rouse him from the stupor that seemed to have struck him as he contemplated her last remark. “Come on, Bill. I was kidding about the snakes,” she said in his ear. “Probably.”

As Bill edged toward the pew he stepped on a black cylindrical shape coiled at his feet, and his mouth opened to let out a scream that would have rattled the stained glass, but before he could get his diaphragm to work, his brain realized that he was in fact standing on the cord to the ministerial microphone, which was attached to the sound system in the back corner. The mike itself, a cigar-shaped handheld instrument, was perched on a plastic stand atop a homemade pine lectern at the front of the sanctuary.

The small sanctuary was so jammed with bodies that it was difficult to make out the look of the room, but when Bill’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw that a wagonwheel chandelier illumined the altar area, casting a sickly yellow glow on the lectern, but shedding very little brightness elsewhere. The walls were lined with a dark pressed-wood paneling (sold at building-supply stores for about five dollars a square mile) that seemed to absorb light, and the ceiling was low, adding to the catacomb effect of the room.

“Where’s Mrs. Morgan?” whispered Edith, elbowing Bill in the ribs.

“Which one?” he hissed back.

“Well, exactly!” said Edith. “I’ll bet most of this congregation is here for the begats instead of the amens.”

There was a shuffling of feet and a murmur of voices, and then a slender, middle-aged woman in a crimson robe made her way up the aisle and sat down at the upright piano to the right of the lectern. She pounded out a few bars of “Come to the Church in the Wildwood” to announce the start of the service, and the congregation struggled to its feet.

“All rise,” muttered Edith. “The honorable rooster is about to crow.”

“Behave!” Bill whispered back. “This crowd might believe in stoning unbelievers.”

No one was paying any attention to them, though, because the Reverend Chevry Morgan had chosen that moment to make his grand entrance. A side door at the front of the room opened, and Chevry Morgan sauntered in, wearing an unmistakable smirk of satisfaction. Trailing behind him were two women. The dowdy, middle-aged one stared at the floor, and the ferret-faced teenager tossed her head and smiled at the crowd like a beauty-pageant contestant.

Bill craned his neck to get a better look at the man he thought of as the defendant. Even with his shiny pompadour hair, Chevry Morgan did not make it to six feet in height, but he was big-boned and burly, with a ruddy complexion and a toothy grin. He was wearing an old tweed sport jacket over a teal-blue work shirt and khaki pants. He had on a bolo tie. Bill decided that his own coat and tie probably qualified him to be a bishop in this laid-back crowd.

Morgan walked to the podium, threw back his head so that his dark hair whipped back from his face, and hoisted the microphone into the air as if he was displaying a trophy. “Hallelujah!” he shouted.

“Hallelujah!” the crowd roared back.

Bill was still watching the two Mrs. Morgans. They stood together for a moment on the left side of the podium; then the minister set the microphone back on its plastic stand and motioned for them to join him. As they stood on either side of him he took their hands and held them up, shouting “Hallelujah!” above a chorus of applause and whistles from the audience.

Edith began flipping through a hymnal. “Looking for airsickness bags,” she murmured in answer to Bill’s look of inquiry.

Bill turned his attention back to the family tableau at the altar. Donna Morgan looked mortified to be the center of such raucous attention. She kept her eyes fixed on the carpeted floor and tried to smile, wincing a little when her husband dropped her hand and wrapped his arm around her for a bear hug. Tanya Faith Morgan seemed much more at ease. She grinned out at the applauding darkness and stood up on tiptoes to give her husband a peck on the cheek. She was a scrawny sixteen-year-old, trying hard to appear grown-up with a sophisticated hairdo, a white sheath dress, and two-inch heels, but she certainly didn’t look like someone who had been sold into bondage. Bill wondered which of the people in the audience were her parents and how they really felt about the matter.

After a few more moments of applause, the congregation sat down, and Bill could see Donna and Tanya Faith making their way to front-row seats. Apparently, they sat together at the services. Now Chevry Morgan had the stage to himself, obviously the way he wanted it.

He stepped up to the podium and gripped it with both hands. His wide-legged stance reminded Bill of a rock star. “Good evening, believers!” he roared at the crowd.

Most of them hailed back. Bill took out his pen and a small notepad to take notes on Morgan’s sermon.

“Are you strong in the faith, tonight?”

A louder roar answered him.

“It’s not easy, you know,” he said, picking up the microphone as if he were about to break into song. “It’s not easy being a believer, when what you know is right differs from the opinion of the majority.”

There were murmurs of assent from the congregation.

“People don’t believe that we can speak with the tongues of angels when the spirit moves us. Don’t believe that I had a revelation from the Almighty.”

Bill heard Edith mutter, “Amen!”

“But I did,” said Chevry Morgan, raising his voice to preaching pitch. “The Lord told me that man wasn’t any different from the rest of His creatures. He said, ‘Chevry, look at the rooster. There’s one rooster strutting around that barnyard, being husband to a couple dozen hens. And there’s one stallion presiding over an entire herd of mares, is there not?’”

Edith snatched Bill’s pen, and wrote Animal Husbandry? on his notepad. Bill tried to look stern so that they would not both collapse into helpless laughter. They were a definite minority, though. The rest of the audience was murmuring encouragement to the florid man, who had loosened his tie in preparation for a real harangue.

“So the Lord told me that man was meant to live like the rest of His creations.”

Edith wrote: Outdoors? Eating raw meat?

“-He told me to take another wife, to show my faith in His teachings.” He strode away from the lectern to point dramatically at Tanya Faith. “Behold the woman!” He shouted. “A gift from God!”

Tanya Faith stood up and waved solemnly to the congregation. Chevry Morgan motioned for her to sit back down.

Speaking of thinking you are God’s gift… Edith scribbled hurriedly.

The minister bowed his head, and the room filled with an electric silence. Finally he raised his head, eyes closed, and intoned, “There are those who would persecute me for my faith, believers.” His eyes blazed open, and he began to pace back and forth in front of the lectern, still clutching the microphone. “There are those who would mock my divine revelation. They call me names and laugh at my belief. They try to shake the faith of my wife Donna, and to make her think that the Lord’s chosen way is wrong. They want to lock me away in a jail cell for what I believe. In America, neighbors! Religious persecution!”

There were murmurs of protest from the crowd. Somebody shouted, “Keep the faith!”

What if you’re a devout ax murderer, and the Lord told you to do it? Edith wrote on Bill’s notepad.

Bill wrote back: Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.