Louisa and the Missing Heiress (7 page)

“May I?” I said to Constable Cobban, who stood next to her now, ready to pull the sheet back over Dot’s face since that identification had been completed. “I would like to keep her scarf as a memento mori. . . .”

“Of course. I don’t suppose Mr. Wortham would object, so why should I?” Cobban said gruffly.

I felt his strange pale eyes watching me, and my fingers grew awkward and could not undo the knot in her scarf.

More gently, Cobban said, “Let me untangle it for you, Miss Alcott. It may be difficult and . . .” He did not finish, but I knew what he meant: Now that the final kiss had been given, it was frightening, gruesome, to have to touch that body from which the spirit of my friend had departed. Dot was fled from here, and all that remained was an emptied vessel, a broken promise.

With surprising gentleness, Sergeant Cobban raised the corpse’s head just enough so that the scarf could be unknotted and pulled away. Because rigor mortis was already setting in, the whole torso lifted at an unnatural angle, as if a board had been slipped into her garments to keep her straight, as some mothers did with new babes. One of Dot’s mud-stiffened curls fell out of the snood that captured them, and swung down over the table. I could not help feeling dizzy, but I stood my ground.

“Here,” Sergeant Cobban said, pulling the scarf free and handing it to me. And because Sergeant Cobban was looking at me, and not the corpse, and Wortham was already hovering near the door, either consumed by nausea and grief or simply distracted, I was the first to see them: little blue bruises on both sides of the neck.

“What’s this?”

Constable Cobban saw my eyes narrow with concentration and surprise. He leaned closer to the body, poked gently with his fingertips at the marks, rubbed them slightly as if hoping they might erase. They did not.

“Well, now,” he said, standing upright and rocking on his heels, deep in thought. “Indeed, this puts the case in a new light entirely.” Cobban hailed the morgue attendant, who had been sitting at a zinc table reading a book. We could see the title: Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
.

The mustachioed attendant put down his book and sprinted over to the officer’s side. Obviously he knew Cobban, and knew Cobban was a man you didn’t keep waiting.

“Postmortem on this woman,” Cobban ordered.

“We’re backed up . . .” the attendant started to protest, then changed his mind. “Two days,” he said.

“Tomorrow morning,” Cobban said.

“Postmortem?” Preston Wortham, who had been leaning against the wall nearest the door, burying his hands in the armpits of his wool coat and stamping his feet against the cold of the room, paid attention once again to what was going on a few yards away. “Does that mean an autopsy? Since when is an autopsy done on a suici—I mean an accident victim? I won’t allow the desecration of poor Dot. . . .”

“Mr. Wortham, there must be a postmortem. Wouldn’t you like to know exactly how your young wife died?” There was a note in Constable Cobban’s voice that made Wortham uncomfortable. I peered expectantly at him, eager for his answer.

“I know how she died,” the husband insisted. “She slipped and fell and drowned. And now I am going to visit her minister and arrange the funeral.”

“Three days. That’s when the funeral will be,” Cobban insisted. “Unless you want the body disinterred. The bruises make it a case needing further examination. Medical jurisprudence will be required.” Cobban would not be moved. He had decided.

“Bruises?” Preston moved closer and peered down at his wife’s exposed neck. He blanched and swallowed hard, then looked defiantly at Cobban.

The two men glared at each other. Preston was the first to drop his eyes. “Well, if you believe it is necessary,” he said. “But on point of order, I protest this autopsy, as will the rest of the family. Not all in the family are without influence,” he added.

“I have heard of the Brownlys,” Cobban said icily. “I know Mrs. Brownly will try to have my head on a platter. But she won’t get it. Now I suggest you all go home. You’ve had a shock.” And to make his point, Cobban ushered us to the door, as if we were children dismissed from school.

I turned to him. “I would like to view the postmortem. They do require witnesses, don’t they?”

“Miss Alcott,” protested Preston. “Remember that you are a lady! It is unfit, outrageous!”

And that (I knew such comments gave rise to stubbornness within myself that rivaled my father’s!) made me insist that I would view it.

“A full jury will view, as the law requires,” Cobban said. “Because of your relationship to the deceased and her husband you may not be part of that jury, but I will arrange a place for you to sit among them. Are you certain, Miss Alcott? A postmortem is not an easy thing to view.”

“I am certain,” I said. A strong determination was firing through my backbone, a determination to search for the truth about Dot.

Cobban studied me as if he were looking for something. He found it. “Tomorrow at ten promptly,” he said. As I left, he touched my shoulder, a gesture between a comforting pat and a discreet push. I could not help but wonder: Was that a great tenderness or just polite attention to a lady?

“Take a carriage home, Miss Alcott. The streets are dark now,” he said. “And dangerous.”

“I’ll see to the lady,” Preston said, his voice heavy with noblesse oblige.

As I rode home in Preston Wortham’s carriage, I tried to stop seeing Dot, cold in the morgue, and attempted to distract my racing mind by turning my inner eye to a portrait of home, how it would be when I arrived. Abba would still be in the kitchen, kneading biscuit dough for tomorrow. Lizzie would probably be wih her, helping, and May would be in bed, reading a novel. Father would be in his study, preparing a lecture, probably on the free soil movement and abolition. The front door would be unlocked, even though there was no servant to keep watch over the comings and goings of the house, and even though most of Boston not only bolted their doors but added additional bracing. We had no worldly goods to protect and worry over. Yet that home was a paradise.

Poor Dorothy. What had her home, first with her mother then with her husband, been like?

Dorothy was dead. There had been bruises. And whatever had Dot been doing down by the wharves in that part of town?

 

 

“WE WILL HAVE to order a wreath, and I must mend my black bombazine for the funeral,” I told Sylvia. “The protocols of grief must be observed. I once thought mourning and its many rules to be old-fashioned and melodramatic; loss now teaches me otherwise.”

It was the next day, and we were back in the attic. The sheet of paper in front of me was blank. For once I was silenced and literally unable to write. The paper had blisters where mine and Sylvia’s tears had fallen on it.

“What did Abba say?” Sylvia asked.

“To trust in God’s mercy. We wept together and she is being brave, but it has affected her. So much death . . .”

I showed Sylvia my journal entry, about the dreams of the night before . . . a dream of Dottie as she had been as a child, still in the schoolroom, shy yet brave, slow to memorize dates and names but quick to sense a storm coming, or a puppy on the verge of illness. The dreams were mostly rehearsals of what had been, as are most dreams of loss, but in some moments Dottie turned away from the familiar gestures of childhood and stared into my eyes. “So much to talk about, dear Louy,” Dottie said. As she spoke I woke up, still hearing her gentle voice.

Despondent, I felt myself slipping, my friend’s death an unwelcome addition to the oppressive weight already loaded on my shoulders.

“Mother gave me a dose of valerian and told me to put it out of my thoughts,” Sylvia said. “She seems to think Dot got what she deserved, whatever that means. I admit she has never cared for Dot, not like we did. I wonder why. Is that your story, Louy?” Sylvia touched a pile of pages.

“Yes. The one Mr. Fields deems unsuitable and lacking in talent.”

“And to think you actually did go into service. I could never.”

“And I shouldn’t have, I fear. Abba was right. I spent my nights blacking boots and being chased around the kitchen table. I would have been of more use here, at home.” I smiled ruefully.

The house was still. Outside, a dog barked to be let in. Wind rattled withered leaves. I closed my eyes, beckoned Beatrice and the opera house in Italy, the beautiful women with their sparkling jewels and waving plumes, the men with narrow aristocratic faces, opera glasses held high to examine the feminine company in the various boxes. I smelled the champagne and pâté, the perfumes, heard the slight tinkle of crystal from the overhead chandeliers as the velvet curtains parted to reveal the stage, and onstage a set of a castle, a dark night, a new world waiting to receive its visitors. And then one word entered my thoughts—
Dottie
—and the vision of Italy vanished.

“A stage and a blank page have much in common, Sylvia,” I told my companion. “But I can’t concentrate on this story till I discover what has happened to Dot.”

The professions of detective and author, I now know, have much in common. Both involve an attempt to understand the deepest nature of human beings, as well as the act of telling—or uncovering—their deepest, truest stories. Yet when one is overcome by the desire to help a friend and solve a mystery, at least for me, it removes the desire and ability to write. It is similar to the magical time at the end of each novel when I feel completely consumed by my characters. When I am in the middle of a mystery, an event that occurs only when I must save a friend from peril, the detective work consumes my every effort and the muse is, temporarily, struck dumb.

“It is nine-thirty,” Sylvia said, checking the little gold watch pinned to her bodice.

“Sylvie, I worry that even for me this autopsy will prove too distressing,” I said. “Are you certain you wish to come with me? Remember you fainted at the sight of blood last summer when you cut your foot.”

“I shall not let you endure this alone,” she replied staunchly.

I pulled back the muslin curtain and looked out into the street.

“There is no sun today, only clouds,” Sylvia remarked. It seemed undeniably appropriate.

THE POSTMORTEM WAS HELD in the courthouse basement, in a cold and dreary greenish-white room grotesquely shaped like a small theater, with a construction like a wooden stage, and a table on that stage, and rows of facing tiered seats. The gaslight was unnaturally bright and cast deep shadows as people moved. Paid witnesses, mostly hired off the street, filed in and took their places, piling hats and cloaks on empty chairs in the back.

We took a seat in front, center, just three arm’s lengths away. I could see that many of the men in attendance viewed this as a rather bold gesture. I suddenly realized that, if I wished, I could breach convention and reach down and touch my dear friend one last time. I knew I would not, but the urge was there. Sylvia was already visibly trembling.

Waiting, I noted every detail, from the dirty rags in the corner, a stained coffee cup on the edge of the soapstone basin, the triangular sooty stains over the gas lighting fixtures. But always my eyes returned to that table and the solitary figure resting there.

Poor Dot. How alone she looked. Her clothing had been removed and her body wrapped in white sheets soaked in chloride of lime to slow putrefaction. Even so, the sickly odor of death wafted through the room. Many of the witnesses held cologne-soaked handkerchiefs to their noses.

Promptly at ten o’clock (we could hear the bell of Old Trinity ringing) white-bearded Dr. Roder shuffled in from a side door, like an actor uncertain of when to enter stage right. But his stooped posture and vague air were misleading. Boston’s oldest doctor of medical jurisprudence, he had an intimidating reputation as a scholar in the field, with training that could trace its ancestry all the way back to the famous Benjamin Rush. He had studied technique with Duncan in Edinburgh and Thomas Cooper at the University of Pennsylvania, and was a protégé of old Walter Channing himself at Harvard.

It was said of Roder that he could find cause of death in a corpse that had been buried for centuries and then burned for good measure. If Constable Cobban had requested Dr. Roder for the postmortem, then the officer must already suspect foul play.

Roder, well aware that his fame had preceded him, strode to the center of the room, faced the witnesses, and made a little bow. The uncertain actor had become the impresario. There was slight, nervous applause. I turned and glared at the other observers and they put their hands back in their laps and were silent.

“We will begin,” Roder announced.

Cobban, who had been standing in a corner, moved closer to the table. He looked down at Dot with pity and a gentleness that spoke well for a young man who had chosen a career that often required thwacking fugitives on the head and sometimes wearing a revolver inside his coat—unofficially, of course. Revolvers had not yet been issued to the new Boston Police.

A young assistant with long dark hair like an Italian poet’s unraveled the top sheet, leaving Dot’s arms, legs, and shoulders bare, while a second sheet still modestly covered the torso and trunk. Next to me, Sylvia put her hand over her mouth and rolled her eyes to the ceiling.

In the harsh, bright, unforgiving light I could see other bruises on Dorothy’s arms. I knew I had to study this gruesome scene with determined concentration. The bruises were small, pale, as if the blood that would normally pool there where the skin had been insulted hadn’t had time to complete its own work. Death had halted the process. While I felt deep grief for my Dorothy, the spirit of Poe’s Auguste Dupin seemed to fill me with detective zeal.

Cobban had been standing motionless at the head of the marble slab, staring at Dot’s now-loosened hair as if wanting to avoid embarrassing her. The doctor and his attendant, however, handled the corpse with an indifferent boldness that seemed to prolong the humiliation of death.