A. P. Hill was still working out a tactful response to Bill’s offer when the phone rang. He snatched up the receiver. “MacPherson and Hill… Oh, hello, Mother.”
A. P. Hill tuned out the subsequent conversation while she focused on her own misery, and on the fine points of Eleanor’s case. Suddenly she heard Bill say, “She’s what?” And then, “Where is she? Right. As soon as I can.” When he hung up the phone, it took him two tries to replace the receiver.
“What is it, Bill?”
“It’s Elizabeth,” said Bill, with disbelief still lingering in his voice. “She’s in the hospital in Charlottesville.” He glanced toward the receptionist area. “Edith! My sister is in intensive care. What did you two do this morning before she left for UVA?”
“We had breakfast at Shoney’s at six, and then we drove out in the country and looked at Chevry Morgan’s love nest,” said Edith. “What do you mean, she’s in intensive care? What’s the matter with her?”
“You didn’t see Donna Jean Morgan at the house?”
“No. Neither wife was there.”
“You didn’t stop by her place for coffee-?”
“Bill.” A. P. Hill put her hand on his arm. “Donna Jean is in jail. Remember?”
Bill blinked. “Oh, right. I was forgetting. It’s just that the doctors seem to think that Elizabeth has been poisoned. Mother’s on her way up there.”
“Poisoned,” said A. P. Hill, sounding more intrigued than distressed. “I wonder how it was done.”
“I have to go now.” Bill pulled his car keys out of his pocket and started for the door.
A. P. Hill grabbed her purse and followed him out, “Bill, wait! I think I’d better drive.”
“Give me a second to turn the answering machine on and lock the door!” Edith called after them. To herself she muttered, “Hope I don’t come down with it, too.”
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up;
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
– I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.
– A. E. HOUSMAN
A Shropshire Lad
11
ELIZABETH MACPHERSON OPENED her eyes a fraction of an inch, just enough to discern anxious faces peering down at her. She squeezed them shut again.
“I think she’s regaining consciousness,” someone whispered. It sounded like Bill’s voice.
Elizabeth lay there, silently debating the merits of waking up or not, and whether any action on her part would result in an urgent need of a bedpan. She heard more murmuring, and the word nurse was repeated three or four times, at which point she decided that she might as well rejoin the living, because they were only going to poke and prod her until she did.
The light hurt her eyes, and her head still felt like it was in a winepress. “I had a strange dream,” she said faintly. “And you were in it. And you. And you.”
“Do you think she’s delirious?” The voice was definitely that of A. P. Hill, as clinical as ever.
“I think she’s being a smart-ass,” Bill replied, with relief winning out over annoyance. “She’s quoting lines from The Wizard of Oz at us.”
A. P. Hill did not think that such behavior was inconsistent with delirium, but since everyone else seemed relieved and amused, she allowed herself a judicious smile. “I’ll go out and tell Edith and Ms. Casey that she’s coming around,” she said.
Margaret MacPherson nodded. “Thank you, Powell.” She leaned over her daughter’s bedside. “Elizabeth! Do start making sense, please. We want to know what happened to you.”
Elizabeth looked thoughtful. “I was having a conversation with Cameron, I think,” she said. “He asked if I were angry with him for living so recklessly, taking off in that small boat, and all. I said I wasn’t, and I hugged him, and he said-oh, my head!” She closed her eyes again. “Can they give me something for this headache?”
Margaret MacPherson and her son exchanged worried glances. “A nurse should be here soon, dear,” she told Elizabeth. “They’re going to want to know what happened to make you so ill. And now you come awake babbling about Cameron. Oh, Elizabeth! You didn’t do this to yourself, did you?”
“I didn’t think of it,” whispered Elizabeth. “Isn’t that odd? All these weeks of grieving about Cameron, and it never once occurred to me. And now, of course, he has absolutely forbidden it, so that’s that.” She attempted to sit up in bed, and thought better of it as her joints began to ache. “What is the matter with me?”
“Apparently, you were poisoned,” said Bill, sitting down again. He scooted the chair close to Elizabeth’s bedside. “But we can’t figure out how it was done, or by whom. Edith is especially concerned, of course.”
Elizabeth managed a grin. “I expect she is! We shared the same breakfast buffet. It’s not food poisoning, then?”
“Arsenic, they think. They’re running the tox screen again to make sure.”
“Arsenic,” said Elizabeth. “That is interesting. I was reading about arsenic when I started to become ill. I was in the medical library.”
“Hypochondria?” murmured her mother. “Some sort of sympathetic illness?”
“Oh, Mother, really!” said the patient. “You’ve been eating too much tofu! Of course it isn’t psychosomatic. Every muscle in my body will testify to that. I really was poisoned.”
“When? How?” asked Bill. “Did you see Donna Jean? No, I keep forgetting. She’s in jail. Did she ever give you anything to eat or drink?”
“No, of course not. If Edith isn’t sick, we can rule out breakfast, so it had to be something in that house. Dust? Can we ask Edith?”
Edith, wrested away from the March edition of Field and Stream in the waiting room, tried to reconstruct the events of the morning. “We walked through the cemetery,” she said, frowning with the effort of remembering. “You found Lucy Todhunter’s grave. I don’t suppose she zapped you, though, after all this time. You didn’t chew on her flowers, or anything. Then you looked at some Civil War graves, and we climbed the wall and went in the house. We searched the kitchen, and the pantry. There wasn’t any food lying about, though.”
“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).