If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

enrage her beyond the power of tranquilizer darts. If there was anything Amy Powell Hill hated more than chauvinistic men, it was the women who let them get away with it. “They make it harder for me to get taken seriously,” she would rage.

He looked at his notes, thick with underlinings and exclamation points. “All right, Mrs. Morgan,” he said. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Your husband, a part-time minister, claims to have received a directive from God, instructing him to marry a sixteen-year-old girl named Tanya. Her parents agreed to it. They plighted their troth in the back of a carpet truck, and then he brought her home to live with him and with you, his legal wife. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

Bill sat back and silently counted to ten. Mrs. Morgan did not burst out laughing. No video cameras appeared in the doorway. No one giggled in the outer office. She really wasn’t kidding. Bill sighed. And she was his problem. Sooner or later he would accept the reality of the situation, and then no doubt he would be just as appalled as A. P. Hill. Just now, though, he was trying not to be overwhelmed by the absurdity of it.

“A couple of things come to mind here, Mrs. Morgan,” he said, doodling a row of vertical bars on his legal pad. “Statutory rape is a possibility, or a quaint old law that Virginia still has about seduction. We can even look into the exact wording of the statute on bigamy. We may be able to get him on his own admission of polygamy. I’d say the odds are favorable on Chevry doing jail time. That, of course, will strengthen your position in divorce proceedings.”

“But I don’t want a divorce,” said Donna Morgan.

Bill blinked. “You don’t?”

“I told you that it’s against our religion.”

“Yes, ma’am, but harems-I mean, multiple marriages-are against the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia. I don’t even have to look it up to be sure. The government feels quite strongly about it.”

“And I didn’t come here to get Chevry put in prison.”

“Mrs. Morgan, I’m a lawyer, not a marriage counselor. What do you want?”

“I just wondered if there are any rules about wives having to be treated alike. Maybe some kind of contract spelling out our rights? I mean, I believe the Lord willed this and all, but I don’t think He’d want me to take a backseat to Tanya Faith, do you?”

When Bill could trust himself to speak, he said, “I’m sure that the Lord is entirely in sympathy with you, Mrs. Morgan. Why don’t you let me do some checking on the legal ramifications of this? I’ll get back to you.”

Mrs. Morgan gave him a misty smile. “That sounds fine,” she said. “And could you talk to Chevry, too?”

“Believe me,” said Bill. “I am most anxious to do so.”

A. P. Hill’s client interview wasn’t going any better than her partner’s. Eleanor Royden was chatting with cheerful lack of remorse that would have gotten her a life sentence for jaywalking. As she talked she paced the concrete floor, looking at nothing in particular, but her delivery was as polished as a stand-up comic’s. She’s in denial, thought A. P. Hill.

“How long have I known the deceased?” Eleanor Royden toyed with a lock of faded blonde hair and looked thoughtful. “That phrase will take some getting used to. I feel as if I’d just sunk the Bismarck.

Oh, I’ve known Jeb since before your diapers ever polluted a landfill. I met him when I was a freshman in college.”

“So you went to school together?”

“No indeed. I wish I had a cigarette. No, we weren’t at the same school. Jeb was at North Carolina State University, very macho and self-important in prelaw, and I was bouffant hair and a string of cultured pearls at Meredith, which is a Baptist women’s college. I think the State boys saw Meredith as a kind of stocked trout pond.” She shrugged. “And maybe we looked on them as potentially wealthy patrons. I majored in art. Not even art education so that I might have been able to get a teaching job. Just art. And I can’t draw worth a damn. It was just a fashionable way to pass the time while I primped and partied, and looked for a breadwinner.” She bent down and peered at the young lawyer. “Can you relate to any of this, Sunshine?”

“No.” A. P. Hill gave an involuntary shudder. “I’d sooner join the marines.”

“Yes, I believe you would,” said Eleanor, resuming her pacing. “But you are of a different generation, you know. In my day, that is what proper young ladies did. They were supposed to be half of a career. The dinner party and housekeeping part. We were raised to think that those things mattered.”

“I see.”

“Oh, I had a bookkeeping job for a bit, working for a friend of my father, but everybody called that working for dress money. It meant they didn’t have to pay me much. And I suppose I was glad enough to quit and become Mrs. Jeb Royden, do-mes-tic engineer.”

“So you did not work outside the home,” said A. P. Hill, making notes. “You devoted yourself to your husband’s career and well-being.”

Eleanor Royden hit the conference table with her fist. “And I did a good job, too, damn it! I can cater a cocktail party on forty minutes’ notice. I had our Christmas cards done every year by November twenty-ninth. Our house is spotless, and in all these years I never once asked Jeb Royden to pick up a sock, or wash a dish, or take out the trash. I never let him see me in curlers. And I can still fit into my college ball gowns! I did everything right!”

A. P. Hill sighed. “And he divorced you anyhow.”

“Yes! Was that fair?”

“Mrs. Royden, I’m afraid that justice doesn’t have much to do with human relationships.”

“It does now.” Eleanor pantomimed a pistol shot with her thumb and forefinger.

“You have to stop doing this,” said A. P. Hill with a note of desperation in her voice. “The legal system takes a very dim view of people who gloat.”

“You don’t know what I’ve been through these past two years.”

“So tell me. What happened to your marriage?”

“Jeb turned fifty. Don’t men get strange when they hit middle age? I think it’s testosterone poisoning. Do you suppose anyone is working on a cure? We could organize a telethon.” She struck a pose. “‘Poor Baldy is doomed to a life of bimbos and NordicTrack, unless you help…’”

A. P. Hill sighed impatiently. “I realize that this humor is a defense mechanism, Mrs. Royden, and that you are probably experiencing a delayed shock, but I need to hear the facts. Do you feel up to talking about the divorce?”

“Why not? I’ve dined out on it for two years now. What do you want to know?”

“Well… what were the circumstances leading up to your separation?”

“My husband the legal piranha defended the bimbo landscaper against some unhappy clients, and he won the case, and out of gratitude or opportunism-opinions vary-she tapped his maple tree, to use a colorful plant metaphor.”

“Hmmm,” said A. P. Hill. “Can you tell me something a little more concrete about the second Mrs. Royden?”

“Well, she died young.” Eleanor Royden’s cackle of laughter ended in a smoker’s cough. She patted her chest and continued. “Oh, there wasn’t much to her that I could see except youth. A valuable, but perishable commodity. She was young and pretty, with a mind like an Etch-A-Sketch toy. She had a good figure, though. It pleased Jeb’s vanity to see the lust on other men’s faces when he walked into a room with her. Men would nudge him and say, ‘You sly dog!’ That’s puzzling, isn’t it?”

“How so?” asked A. P. Hill.

“It’s like being praised for buying a Mercedes. I mean, if you won one or even stole one, there might be some distinction in it, but any fool with a fat wallet can obtain one, so what constitutes the triumph? So if a fat, ugly, poor middle-aged bore managed to snare a young beauty, then maybe it would be a coup, but, hey, with Jeb’s money, he could have rented sweet young things by the hour, so why the to-do that one of them let herself be taken by him on a long-term lease?”

“You ought to recruit for convents, Mrs. Royden,” said A. P. Hill. “You make marriage seem like a disease.”

Eleanor smiled. “Yes, but it’s generally fatal to women only. In my small way, I hope to have changed