If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

arsenic eating: you can never quit.”

“Why not?” asked A. P. Hill. “Can’t you just taper off, until your body is no longer physically dependent?”

“Apparently, withdrawal is so horribly painful, that few if any addicts ever succeeded in quitting. The article was adamant about one thing, though: you can’t quit cold turkey, because if you do, the last dose you took acts as a poison on your system, just as it would affect the system of anyone who ingested a large dose of arsenic.”

“The last dose kills you,” mused Bill.

“Exactly. So the arsenic eater has to take his dose of arsenic every day in order to stay alive. He also has to take it in solid form, by the way.”

“I thought poisoners usually slipped arsenic into someone’s drink,” said A. P. Hill.

“Yes, but that’s how you administer arsenic when you want someone to die.” Elizabeth shivered. “That’s why I got so sick from drinking the tainted water at the old house. Apparently, arsenic in a liquid solution goes to the kidneys and other vital organs, and can cause a rapid, painful death.” She touched her abdomen gingerly. “I can testify to the painful part.”

“Arsenic eaters take their daily dose in solid form, then?” Bill held up a sugar packet between his thumb and forefinger, looked down at his iced tea, and tossed the packet down unopened.

“Yes. And they take care not to drink anything for a couple of hours after ingestion so that the arsenic isn’t carried to the kidneys in solution. Arsenic addicts take their drug in white powdered form.” She picked up Bill’s discarded sugar packet and smiled. “It looks a lot like sugar.”

“The beignet!” A. P. Hill had been listening to the evidence, and now she could see where the chain of reasoning led.

“Exactly! According to the testimony from Lucy Todhunter’s trial, Philip Todhunter was in the habit of eating a beignet for breakfast every morning. His wife, Lucy, always brought it to him, and the pastry was always covered with powdered sugar.”

“She brought him arsenic?” said Bill, whose appetite for dessert was rapidly disappearing.

“Yes-he insisted on it. He was an arsenic addict, so the arsenic beignet would not kill him. On the contrary, it kept him alive. They both knew that he had to have his daily dose of arsenic to survive.”

A. P. Hill looked thoughtful. “In that case it isn’t attempted murder to give someone arsenic.”

“Oh, no,” Elizabeth agreed. “It was medicinal. The attempted murder occurred-and succeeded-on the day that Lucy Todhunter brought her husband a beignet covered with powdered sugar.”

“Which he thought was arsenic.”

“Of course he did! Perhaps he had been trying to stop his addiction. I don’t know. The guests testified that he had been ill for nearly two days, and that he had eaten nothing. Obviously, he had given up trying to do without his required dose of arsenic when he accepted the beignet. Lucy, whom he had trusted for all those months to bring him his daily measure of poison, gave him the sugared pastry, and he ate it, thinking that his pains would soon cease once the drug stabilized his system, but instead the pains got worse, and he said to her, ‘Why did you do it?’ Meaning, I think, why did you bring me sugar instead of arsenic.”

“Why did she do it?” asked Edith. “I know you lawyers don’t set any store by motives, but the rest of us like to think that the world makes sense.”

“Let’s leave that point for a moment,” said A. P. Hill. “I’m interested in proof. Elizabeth, how did you know that Philip Todhunter was an arsenic eater to begin with? Have you any proof?”

“Yes. I first suspected that he might be an arsenic eater when I heard descriptions of him as a hypochondriac. His doctors described him as pale, with a clear waxy complexion. That description tallies with the addiction. Also, I knew that he had been in pain from injuries he’d suffered during the war, and I thought that some physician might have prescribed a tonic with arsenic as part of his treatment then. Arsenic was often used in patent medicines in those days. He could have built up a slight tolerance from taking an arsenic-laced tonic, and then later he might have drifted into a full-fledged addiction, eating pure arsenic.”

“Speculation,” said A. P. Hill.

“I haven’t finished, Powell. Remember that the doctors tested the uneaten part of the beignet and Philip Todhunter’s stomach contents for arsenic, and they found none. But during the autopsy, hair and tissue samples from Todhunter’s body tested positive for arsenic. He had arsenic in his system, but not in his stomach, and not from the pastry he ate on the day of his death. So, where did the residual arsenic come from? I realized that he had to have been taking it on a long-term basis.”

“Maybe Lucy was administering it to him on a long-term basis,” A. P. Hill pointed out.

“No. Otherwise, he would have been exhibiting the symptoms of poisoning long before that final illness. If the major were being poisoned without his knowledge, he would have had a history of gastric attacks, vomiting, lethargy, and all the other symptoms of systematic poisoning. But there’s no evidence of that. His last illness was sudden, violent, and unprecedented. The only theory that fits the facts is the one I gave you: Todhunter, an addicted arsenic eater, was killed because his wife withheld his supply of the drug, thereby triggering an attack that stressed his system so severely that his heart gave out.”

“You still haven’t told us why she did it,” said Edith.

“I know,” said Elizabeth. “If you think it’s difficult to solve crimes after a century has passed, you should try coming up with motives.”

“Don’t you have any idea?” asked Edith.

“Not really. I know there was some talk of his selling her farm, but that seems hardly sufficient.”

“Motives don’t have to be sufficient,” said A. P. Hill. “People have been killed for the most trivial of reasons. Last July, a man in Vinton was convicted of manslaughter for killing his buddy over a tomato. That’s why the law doesn’t require good motives, only good evidence.”

“So she got away with murder, why ever she did it,” said Bill cheerfully. “It happens, we all know that. And she probably lived to a ripe old age on her husband’s money.”

“She died less than a year later,” Donna Jean Morgan replied, perhaps resenting any implicit comparison. “In childbirth.”

“Oh,” said Bill. “Sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Lucy Todhunter was probably resigned to that eventuality,” said Elizabeth. “She had nearly died twice before with miscarriages. She’d had to go away for quite a while to the spa at White Sulphur Springs to recover her health. You’d have thought she’d stop trying to conceive.”

Edith grumbled, “Some men won’t take no for an answer.”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “That’s true. They demand an heir. And apparently Major Todhunter was one of those brutal bastards, because he kept getting her pregnant as soon as she could walk again. Ugh. Poor Lucy.”

A. P. Hill looked thoughtful. “I think I’d like to have defended Lucy Todhunter,” she said quietly.

“But I told you, I’m sure she was guilty.”

The lawyer nodded. “I know she was. I would have entered a plea of self-defense.”

The next morning the triumph of saving one client had faded, and despite a slight hangover from overcelebrating, Bill was concentrating on his obligations to the other client: Miri Malone.

“Maybe I should represent the dolphin,” he said to A. P. Hill, who was trying to drink her tea in peace.

“I have a murder trial coming up, Bill,” she said in her most discouraging tones.

“Yes, but you’re not working on it at the moment, Powell, so why don’t you just listen to some of my ideas for this civil-rights case?”

In the outer office the telephone rang, but Edith got it on first ring, and the partners relaxed again and resumed their conversation.

“All right.” A. P. Hill sighed. “I suppose I’d better hear it before you go public with it. Go on-you were thinking of representing the dolphin. Why?”

“Because we’re not trying to transfer ownership from the Sea Park to Miri. We’re trying to prove that Porky is a person, and that no one should own him. Therefore, he needs his own attorney.”

“Have you ever tried billing a dolphin?”

“I see what you mean, but after all, Powell, money isn’t the first consideration. This could be a landmark case in animal rights.”

“You might consider becoming a vegetarian,” his partner advised. “The question is bound to come up in press conferences if you’re defending the civil rights of a dolphin.”

Bill frowned. “I’m not defending cows,” he said.