Louisa and the Missing Heiress (8 page)

Active now, Cobban leaned over Dot once again, studying the neck, jotting in his notebook where and how the bruises were located, the shape of them. He looked up, so he could see me. His eyes were wary.

I understood instinctively that the marks on Dot’s body could not have been self-inflicted. Young Mrs. Wortham had been very roughly handled, and recently. Were the bruises acquired at death, or sometime before? Were the bruises connected with her death? I tried to convey to Constable Cobban through my eyes and expression that we were thinking alike.

Dr. Roder started the examination at the head. He swept to one side the wealth of loosened pale hair and leaned close, pulling up the eyelids, swabbing out the ears, and prying open the mouth.

“It would appear,” he began, speaking loudly, “to be a case of dynamic death, rather than mechanical. The woman is young and with no evidence, yet, of ill health or disease that would cause bodily failure. She was pulled from the harbor, yet there is no sign of river water in her mouth. In cases of drowning, a negative poisoning of the blood ensues, since the blood, suddenly deprived of the influence of the oxygen of the atmosphere, becomes unfit to vivify.”

Heads in the gallery nodded to indicate comprehension. One very ancient top-hatted gentleman in the back row was already nodding off. He would be paid his ten cents whether he stayed awake or not.

“There are bruises on the throat seemingly made by a hand,” Roder continued. “Moreover, there is a large lump over one ear, invisible to the eye because of the healthy thickness of the subject’s hair. But it is a lump, nonetheless, suggesting injury before death. A man, or a woman, may fall alive into water and die there without being drowned, as when she receives a fatal injury by falling with her head hitting a rock. But when a woman in falling into the water receives a fatal cranial injury whereof she dies before she drowns, then she is certainly not drowned, but has fallen dead into the water.”

Roder paused and looked at Cobban. “I am, of course, suggesting unnatural death,” he said, in case his train of thought hadn’t been followed. The paid witnesses leaned forward, interested now.

“Could the injuries have occurred after she fell into the water?” Cobban asked.

“Forensics is a science that sometimes provides more questions than answers, but in this case I would say no,” Roder said, poking again at Dot’s throat to test for sponginess in the tissue. “There is no swelling of the sinuses that follows a death by cerebral hypostasis caused by drowning.”

He moved from Dot’s head to her right side, where he lifted her hand and used a sharp little knife to scrape under the nail of her index finger. He then held a magnifying glass over the knife tip.

“There is no sign of sand or wood or any other substance that the deceased, in her death throes, might have attempted to clutch,” Roder said. “In my great experience”—he endowed the usually monosyllabic
great
with three syllables, I remember noting—“accidental drownings always have some such refuse under the nails, left during a vain attempt at self-rescue; but many drowning suicides have similar refuse, as if, in the last moment, they have changed their minds and now wish to reverse the decision of self-destruction.”

Roder put Dot’s hand back at her side. He pressed gently on her chest, then again peered into the open mouth.

“No evidence of tracheal froth, produced when inhaled fluid mixes with the natural mucus of the passages.”

“An indication she wasn’t breathing when she fell into the river,” Cobban said.

“You have been studying my papers. Well done, Constable,” Roder said. “But the absence of tracheal froth could also indicate that putrefaction has already begun,” he corrected him. “Gas is forming in the abdomen.” Roder pressed at the base of Dottie’s rib cage. “Most telling, however, are the lungs. They are not expanded, in fact are firm and crepitating. In a victim of drowning, the lungs distend and acquire a spongelike consistency. The torso would be misshapen by now.”

Roder paused and reached to a tray an assistant carried. He picked a large, shiny knife. I flinched instinctively and fought the urge to cover my eyes. Next to me, Sylvia gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth, covering it.

“Time to open the cavity and examine the organs,” Roder announced.

Another assistant pulled away the last sheet covering Dot’s hips and legs and she lay there, naked and completely vulnerable, exposed to friends and strangers alike. I had to keep from crying out in protest. How Dot would have hated this, Dot who would not even pull up her stockings before other women but always retreated to her chamber or the water closet to make any adjustment of clothing, now lying there as naked as a newborn for all to gaze upon. Just as well that none of the family were here . . . this was not the way to remember the young woman, greenly white, blue eyes staring dumbly at eternity, the rest of the body as exposed as any lamb ready for slaughter.

How—why—had she been brought to this? What awful circumstances and passions had led her on this course?

Two factors already argued against suicide. First, the coroner’s statement that most suicides preserved, somewhere in the destroyed body, the wish to undo, to live, and Dot’s corpse had no such evidence. Could her grief, that secret despair she had worn upon her return from the honeymoon, have been so deep as to thwart even the most instinctive instruction to live?

I concentrated on the past and suddenly remembered how Abba had once described Dottie:
A little simple, sometimes, but full of love, the kind of woman who will live a long life and never regret a moment of it.
No. Dottie could not have overcome her own nature, which was to live. No one could forget her trials on the gorgeous chestnut pony she had received for her tenth birthday—and avidly shared with all of us, her friends. The pony was a beauty with a horrid disposition; it bit, stood its ground, and whenever Dot gained her rightful place in the saddle, without so much as a by-your-leave the pony would buckle and throw her to the ground. Eventually even Mrs. Brownly put her foot down and insisted the pony be returned, but Dot, more stubborn, cried for days. She hated to give up.

At the postmortem, though, I looked down upon Dot’s bruised, naked, lifeless body and realized that this was the final insult to whatever injury had quenched that fine spirit. Even her modesty had been annihilated.

Death was a destroyer, and Dot’s virtues had been destroyed along with the rest of her.

Roder was beginning to lift organs out of the opened cavity of Dorothy’s body.

“Louy,” Sylvia pleaded. She had turned pale green.

“We must get you into the air,” I said, helping her from her seat. “We have seen enough here. Too much for you, I fear.”

It was late morning when I left the bowels of the morgue and returned to the thin light of a cold winter day, much as Orpheus strode back to life, away from the underworld and his beloved Eurydice. The dead live in a place that the living cannot abide. I had visited that place, and now had to pick up again the threads of my own life.

Sylvia recovered after many deep breaths and some mild fanning with a handkerchief, and apologized for her weakness. Bravely, she suggested we finish the morning with a visit to Mr. Wortham, so he might hear of the postmortem from us and not a stranger.

“After what I have seen, I am not ready to converse with him,” I remember replying. We both felt, at that moment, a dawning antipathy for the man who had once been a friend, albeit not a close friend. Weren’t husbands supposed to keep their wives safe from harm?

“We will walk for a while and get our bearings,” I suggested.

Without planning, we found ourselves turning east, toward the Customs House and the harbor, where Dot had been found.

Who had been there with her when she fell? Whose face had been her last vision of this life? Her husband’s? Unlike most heiresses, Dot had married for love above all other considerations. Yet yesterday, the last time we had seen her alive, the marriage seemed to have already soured. Was Preston Wortham a murderer? No. Impossible to think so. Murder required cunning, an urge to action, which lazy, good-natured Preston lacked.

“Waldo Emerson once said to me, when a stable boy much beloved by the locals of Concord had been found guilty of burglary, that if all criminals wore their guilt like a garment the world would have no need of inquiries and investigations,” I said, thinking aloud. “Dot was seen in the morning, at breakfast, and then discovered later that afternoon. She had died—been murdered?—in full daylight, in a very busy part of Boston. How?”

The morning fog had not lifted, and the great ships and smaller schooners of Boston Harbor rocked gently on the swells like gargantuan birds, their wings tucked under, barely visible through the drifting mist and spray. Rigging creaked; watch bells clanged; the voices of the shoremen and dockhands echoed and repeated, bouncing off that thick pea-soup fog. A laborer carrying a hogshead of rum on his shoulder as if it were no more than a five-pound sack of flour bumped into me and almost knocked me into the water, so thick was the weather.

“There was no fog on the day Dot died,” I continued, accepting his apologies and straightening my hat. “Something else concealed the crime. What could it have been?”

“It is bustling here, Louisa,” Sylvia complained. “I can barely hear you.”

“Of course. There was a distraction of some sort,” I said. “Thank you, Sylvia.”

“You are welcome, I’m sure,” she said, only a little confused.

The heavy, fetid smell of death mixed with the sea spray on our faces, with the gray clouds jostling in the sky and adding depth to the landlocked fog, with the curses and yells of the sailors and dockworkers. Another body, moving quickly through the blinding air, bumped into me, and I clutched my reticule closer, between arm and side, trying to foil the pickpockets who worked this part of the city. It was noisy here by the Customs House, bustling with feverish activity, with street sellers calling their wares and fishermen mending nets, and workers carrying bundles to the great stone house, the heart and soul of Boston commerce.

Had Constable Cobban said exactly where Dot had been found? No. Only that it had been very close to the Customs House.

“Well,” I said to Sylvia, “I will make inquiries.”

A little kiosk badly in need of paint and offering sugared water and crab cakes leaned on the right side of the Customs House, not quite touching, but close enough that the larger building protected the tiny one from the strongest winds. The crab-cake seller was an ancient woman, a sailor’s widow, whose vision and hearing had been dimmed by time but whose curiosity made up for those weakened faculties.

“A woman hound? A bitch you are seeking?” the crone screeched in response to my first question.

“No, no. A woman drowned. Yesterday. Do you know where she was found?” I yelled back.

“Ah, poor thing.” The crone chuckled. “Indeed I do. Right there, before my very eyes, her body floated.” She pointed with a gnarled and trembling finger straight ahead. “Lovely gown,” she said. “Will it go to a charity house, do you think?”

Downcurrent, I noted. Then she would have entered the water up there, somewhere beyond the Customs House.

“I could use that coat she was wearing,” the old woman insisted. “Once it dries it will be a fine wrap, even if the buttons don’t meet the buttonholes. A shame, a fine coat like that, and her in it all dead and weedy. I’ve said oft enough they shouldn’t let the fine folk and their children come down here. Too rough, I say. But the nobs from Beacon Hill will come to see the ships.”

I was glad, at the moment, for the fog and the crone’s poor eyesight, for I blushed then, myself a Beacon Hill resident, though never a nob. Abba had insisted when we moved from Concord to Boston that we reside in a respectable part of town, for my sisters’ sakes.

“The children be the worst part. They are always falling in and needing to be rescued. Yesterday a child fell in and the nurse screamed bloody horror, running back and forth, not brave enough herself to jump in and fetch the child.” The old woman smiled with glee.

“When?” I asked. “When did the child fall in?”

“Let’s see. I’d had my soup, so it was after dinner, but old man Burns hadn’t come by yet for his crab and pickle, so it was before five. Quite a commotion t’were. The shipowners and managers screamed almost as loud as the nurse, for most the men stopped work to watch. They’d been working steady till then, no other distractions.”

A commotion in the afternoon. And perhaps, farther up harbor, a woman was hit on the head, strangled, thrown into the water, and no one heard; no one noticed.

“It could have happened like that,” I said to Sylvia. “Pull the woman—I know it sounds strange, Sylvia, but if I say ‘Dorothy’ just now I will weep; I know I will—pull the woman out of view, behind one of those piles of crates waiting to be loaded, at the moment when the commotion is at its greatest, and you could commit murder in broad daylight, in the busiest part of Boston.”

“Murder, Louisa?” Sylvia asked, unwilling to believe.

“Would you find suicide more believable?” I asked firmly.

“No. Of course not.”

“Second day in a row.” The crone was chuckling. “Day before, another little girl fell in. Pretty little thing she was, before she was sodden, that is. That be strange, two days in a row. Them nobs should stay at home. . . .”

“Thank you,” I said. “If you need a winter coat, you can get one at the charity house next to Trinity Church. I’ll make sure there is one there for you.”

“The young woman’s? That fur collar looked warm.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “I’ll have to ask her family.”

One part of the mystery had offered itself up to possible answers: the how of Dot’s death. It was too soon, I felt, to think about the next question: Why? The why would, of course, lead to who, and that part of the mystery must be approached cautiously, slowly, gravely.