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.”
8
“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!”
“You mean Eleanor Royden? In what way?” Elizabeth was being briefed on the case in her capacity as the official investigator for the firm of MacPherson and Hill. “Is the client unintelligent?”
“I wish,” said Powell bitterly. “Stupid defendants are wonderful to work with. They do what you tell them, because they can’t think of anything else to do. You know the saying that a trial is like a chess game. Well, it is, but we lawyers like it that way, and we don’t want the red king to look up and say, ‘Rook to Queen Three,’ while the game is in progress.”
“But it’s Mrs. Royden’s trial,” Elizabeth pointed out. “Not to mention her life. Of course she’d want some input.”
“She’s had that. She exercised her freedom of choice and hired me. Now she should shut up. Usually, even clever people accused of first-degree murder are as cooperative as the dimwits, because they are completely terrified. A silverback trial lawyer once told me that killers make the best clients, because they have too much at stake to argue with you. And, of course, most murderers are not overly intellectual, anyhow. Eleanor Royden is the exception on both counts.”
“What has she done?”
A. P. Hill reached into a drawer on the side of her desk and brought out a thick legal-sized folder. “This, for starters,” she said, passing the file to Elizabeth.
“The Roanoke Times, the Washington Post, the Richmond Times-Dispatch…” Elizabeth let out a low whistle as she leafed through a sheaf of clippings. “This case is getting tremendous coverage. Eleanor Royden seems to be quoted a lot in these articles. Good picture of her!”
“She made me take some L’Oréal to the county jail. And the local women’s group put her in touch with a beautician who went in and did her makeup before the photo session. I wanted a remorseful-looking defendant. I wanted someone who looked shattered about the fact that she had taken two lives. Eleanor looks like she’s trying out for Diane Sawyer’s job.”