Books by Amanda Skenandore
BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY
THE UNDERTAKER’S ASSISTANT
Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation
The UNDERTAKER’S ASSISTANT
AMANDA SKENANDORE
KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
Also by
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE UNDERTAKER’S ASSISTANT
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2019 by Amanda Skenandore
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1368-1
Kensington Electronic Edition: August 2019
ISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1368-1
ISBN-10: 1-4967-1368-0
For my beloved sisters
Jennifer and Kasandra
CHAPTER 1
1875
GEO. WHITMARK, UNDERTAKER, read the weather-bleached shingle above the door. Below, in ragged knife-carved lettering: SCALAWAG.
Effie shuddered, but knocked nonetheless. No answer. She turned the knob. Locked. A crack snaked across the storefront window. She wiped the dusty glass with her hankie and peered inside. An hour past noon and already the interior lamps were dampened. Several caskets stood on display in the shadows. Older models, bare of adornment.
A few paces beyond the front entry, she found the gate to the carriageway ajar and slipped inside. It led to a back courtyard and outbuildings. She ducked beneath a limp, green-tinged clothesline and laid down her luggage. “Colonel Whitmark?”
A rustling sounded from the residence above the shop and she called out again.
“Put the delivery in the storeroom and be gone with you,” a voice hollered from the upstairs gallery.
“I’ve not come with a delivery, I . . .” She stepped beyond the canopy of an overgrown fig tree and looked up. A man with an untrimmed mustache and bloodshot eyes leaned over the balustrade. “Colonel Whitmark?”
“Who are you?”
“Euphemia Jones, sir. I’ve come to offer my services as—”
“No, thank you. I’m not looking for a maid.”
Effie pursed her lips. The dirt-crusted pavers, untamed garden, and grimy windows spoke otherwise. “I’m not a maid. I—”
“How’d you get in?”
“The gate was open, sir. I believe you were waiting for a delivery.”
“Was I?” He shook his head and swilled from a brown bottle. “Close it on your way out, won’t you?” He pushed off from the balustrade and stumbled backward out of sight.
Effie glanced down the shadowy carriageway. She’d come directly from the steamboat, fighting the tide of buggies and wagons, her trunk and embalming cabinet in tow. Would that she might find work elsewhere. But who else in New Orleans would hire her—a Yankee, a woman, a Negro? The thin stash of bills hidden in her petticoat pocket couldn’t buy a steamboat ticket back to Indiana. Not that she’d return. Not for all the bank notes in the South.
“I believe”—she hesitated, hating to mention the connection—“you knew my former employer. During the War. Captain Kinyon.”
The clatter above went silent. “Kinyon did you say?” More silence. “John Kinyon, of Indiana?”
“Yes, sir. I worked as his assistant going on nine years.”
He peeked his head back over the balustrade, looked at her, and chuckled. “By assistant you mean maid?”
Effie slipped a hand into her skirt pocket and clenched the cool brass button tucked within. “No, sir. As an embalmer. I even mix my own preserving fluid, and to far better effect than that premade slop you have stacked in your storeroom.”
“Ha! And that there’s an alligator.” He jutted his chin in the direction of a small green lizard scurrying up the stucco outbuilding.
“No, sir. That’s a lizard. Anolis carolinensis, I believe.”
“It’s an expression, Miss . . .”
“Jones.”
“It means . . . never mind.” He took another swig from his bottle. Even from a dozen feet below, Effie smelled the sharp fumes.
“What makes you think I’m in need of an assistant any more than I am a maid?”
She squeezed the button again, then let it roll back into the corner of her pocket. “Colonel Whitmark—”
“No one calls me colonel anymore,” he said, an edge rising in his voice. “It’s Mister. Or better yet, nothing at all.”
A cold breeze stirred the air, agitating the leaves. Effie glanced at her battered trunk. Thirteen hundred and fifty miles she’d traveled, and for what? To be turned out like a beggar?
“Col—Mr. Whitmark, your showpieces are outmoded and dusty. Your desk is cluttered with invoices. You’ve got feathers and crepe heaped about as if you run a junk shop, not a funerary establishment—and that’s just what I could see through the front window.” She stamped across the courtyard and flung wide the storeroom door. An acrid smell stung her nose. “These empty fluid jars are in sore need of rinsing. As are your instruments, which you haven’t bothered to pack away. And when was the last time you oiled the hinges of your cooling table or laundered the canopy?” She turned back to the gallery. “Whatever your objections to my employment, Mr. Whitmark, it’s clear you’re in want of an assistant.”
The colonel’s lips flattened and his nostrils flared, but Effie paid no mind. She’d not leave without saying her peace. “If it’s my sex that offends, I can assure you my skill with the syringe matches that of any man. If it’s my color, I can only wonder to what end you fought if not the freedom and advancement of my kind.”
For a long while, he was silent. Across the street, a shoe-shiner hollered out to customers. A cat mewled from a nearby yard. Unlatched shutters knocked about in the breeze. When at last Mr. Whitmark spoke, his voice was flat, tired. “I fought for the preservation of the Union, Miss Jones. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“I see.” She held his gaze until he loo
ked away and gulped again from his bottle. With a slow step, she crossed the courtyard, tucked her embalming cabinet beneath her arm, and reached for her trunk.
“John really taught you how to elevate an artery and inject preserving fluid?”
Effie turned. “I can embalm any body you lay before me, Mr. Whitmark. Start to finish.”
His gray eyes glinted. “This I have a mind to see.”
* * *
Winter’s chill followed them from the shop to the morgue. Inside, overhead kerosene lamps cast a fickle glow on the rows of bodies laid out for recognition. Wooden blocks were wedged beneath their necks, keeping their faces upturned and visible. Their death-day shirts and hats and petticoats hung limp from nearby hooks.
Despite the dank air, Effie removed her coat. Neither Colonel Whitmark nor the bespectacled coroner offered to take it for her. Foolish to expect such consideration coming South. She hung her coat apart from the others on a rusty nail jutting from the plaster wall and followed the men across the morgue. They stopped before a body at the far end. Its purple-tinged arm lolled over the edge of the examination table. A grimy sheet covered its bulbous legs.
“Have you an apron?” she asked.
The coroner gaped a moment, then fetched her a balled-up wad of checkered linen. Stained, but seemingly laundered. Effie flapped open the apron, sending a whiplike snap echoing through the room. Gooseflesh prickled her skin. But surely, that was just the cold.
She tied the apron around her waist and rolled up her dress sleeves. A sweet, fetid odor rose from the body, overwhelming the burning kerosene and stench of corn juice bleeding from Colonel Whitmark’s pores.
Not Colonel. Mister.
His bloodshot eyes followed her, steady, even as his body swayed. Undoubtedly, he was waiting for her to faint or fall into hysterics. Then he might dismiss her and return home to his bottle.
Such scrutiny seldom bothered her. She’d spent enough time in bedrooms and parlors crowded with the living—bereft widows, curious children, nosey in-laws—that ignoring them was second nature. Once they realized she didn’t mean to slice open the body but only make a tiny cut to lift the artery, they’d leave her in peace. But Mr. Whitmark remained intent. Hands twitching. Watching. Waiting.
She plucked a few strands of slimy foliage from the body’s auburn hair and probed the skin. Two days dead, maybe more depending on the temperature of the water. “He drowned.”
It was not a question, but both Mr. Whitmark and the coroner nodded.
“Did you drain the water from the lungs and stomach?” she asked.
“Bien sûr,” the coroner said. “Of course.”
Taking care to keep the head elevated, she turned the body on its side and pressed her knee just below the sternum. Dark water bubbled from its lips onto the cracked tile floor, splattering her boots and the hem of her skirt.
Mr. Whitmark chuckled. “Looks like you missed some, Lafitte.”
She pulled over a rickety side table and wiped away the flecks of dried blood before opening her instrument case. A bulb syringe and long rubber tubing lay neatly coiled in the bed of the case beside a spool of silk thread. Her other tools—tweezers, scissors, trocar, needles, catheters, and scalpel—were fastened with elastic loops to the underside of the lid. The long journey had left the scissors and one of the catheters askew. She realigned them with the others, then withdrew the long metal trocar. “First, I’ll tap the abdomen to draw off the gas. Then the injection. Four pints should be sufficient.”
Mr. Whitmark’s gray eyes narrowed. Hitherto he’d regarded her with that jovial indifference common to drunkards, as if she were merely an amusing, though somewhat tedious, apparition.
“You do want that I should continue?” she asked.
He ran an unsteady hand over his flushed cheeks, whiskers rasping against his palm. “I’ll get the jars of fluid from the wagon.”
He shambled off and the coroner with him, leaving her at last alone to work.
She found a pail of clean water and a few strips of linen on a cluttered workbench nearby. Her hands trembled as she dunked the linen and wrung it out. Careful not to damage the fragile, discolored skin, she set about wiping the mud from the body. Soon her hands steadied. This was what she was good at—her work among the dead.
She lit another lamp for better light and pierced the body’s bloated abdomen, just above the navel. Gas whistled through the trocar and the body began to deflate. Effie didn’t flinch at the foul odor. Mr. Whitmark returned with the embalming fluid, setting the jars beside her before slumping onto a stool in the corner. She did her best to ignore him, even as he began to snore.
Her hands worked almost by rote, her mind drifting from the mechanics of the task, from the well-known map of arteries and organs beneath the skin, to the man dead before her.
Had he jumped into the river, well aware of the swift tides and swirling eddies beneath the water’s surface? Had he slipped or fallen? Had someone pushed him in and watched as he drowned?
Surely he had a wife at home wondering at his absence. A mother or uncle or cousin awaiting his return. Yet here he lay, unclaimed.
Perhaps he too was alone. An orphan, a vagabond. Nameless and faceless in this overcrowded city. She drew her scalpel over the neck, revealing the carotid artery, and readied her catheter and syringe pump. Better that way, alone. No one to mourn you in death meant no one to hurt you in life.
After completing the injection and soaking the skin with embalming fluid–saturated rags, the body’s purple hue had all but vanished. For a man two days’ drowned, the corpse looked downright handsome.
Mr. Whitmark startled awake and staggered over when she announced that she was finished. He probed the body’s now-hardened flesh. Sniffed the soap-scented air. Peered at her impeccable sutures. Effie waited, shoulders back, chin high, fingers clasped around her brass button.
“I’d be mad as a March hare to take on a carpetbagger Negress as my assistant,” Mr. Whitmark said, shaking his head. He poked a few more times at the body, then glanced at her. The set of his stubbled jaw softened. “Come by the shop tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 2
Dusk had just begun to settle on the city when Effie reached the shop. The smell of roasting duck perfumed the cool air. Firecrackers popped in the distance, and tin whistles crooned from the streets. In Indiana, Christmas Eve had been a staider affair. The festivities here in New Orleans, chief among them the noise, unnerved her.
In the three weeks since Mr. Whitmark had hired her on, she’d come to know the American Sector well. Newspaper Row on Camp Street. The Cotton District, still fledgling after the War and recent recession. The tiny Chinatown to the northwest, just beyond the commercial bustle.
Immigrants crowded around the business district—Irishmen, Germans, Italians—living in rundown cottages or subdivided townhomes once occupied by Americans who’d since fled to the suburban reaches of the city. Her kind, the freedmen, lived back-of-town, where the city petered out to swampland.
The French Quarter was different. Creoles of every color lived side by side. But Mr. Whitmark had few clients in that part of the city, and Effie had ventured past Canal Street only once to procure embalming chemicals from a pharmacist there.
Work had been inconstant, a dribble of clients some days, none others. The first body they’d been called to, Mr. Whitmark embalmed entirely himself, lecturing her as he worked, as if she’d never seen a syringe pump or mixed a quart of preservative. His technique was solid, if a bit outdated, but his execution sloppy. He cut too large an incision, and his sutures ran uneven. His hand tottered as he worked. No doubt from the liquor.
The next call—a man dead of apoplexy—began the same. Mr. Whitmark bid her stand aside and watch as he demonstrated how to puncture the heart. He’d been called away by the family before retrieving his trocar from the case, though. When he returned, Effie had already drained the right ventricle, injected fluid into the cavity, and cannulated the brachial artery. Thereaft
er, he’d left the embalming to her.
Days when they hadn’t a case, he didn’t wake till noon and retired before the bells of nearby St. Patrick’s tolled six. Sooner if he found his bottle empty. While he slept, she dusted and polished and swept. She oiled the squeaky hinges about the shop, organized the storeroom, and righted his account books. She repainted the sign and sanded away the word Scalawag. She sent for new catalogs from the casket makers. After airing out the wrinkled, moth-eaten skirts from the storeroom, she fastened them around the showpieces in the shop so they didn’t look so naked through the newly scrubbed windows.
If Mr. Whitmark noticed these things, he didn’t say. But he paid her a dollar at the end of each day and said she might as well come back tomorrow. A man of her skill would earn more than twice that sum. Yet with her position so tenuous, she dared not squabble. Besides, it was more than she’d ever made. Captain Kinyon hadn’t paid her at all. Theirs was a family business. At the time, Effie hadn’t minded. It allowed her the delusion she was more to the captain than an apprentice or assistant.
Now, with the overgrown foliage and high courtyard walls buffering the Christmas Eve din, she laid down her equipment, shook out her weary arms, and set about cleaning. She scrubbed and polished her tools. Flushed the rubber tubing. Plunged her smock and the dirtied floor sheet into the washbasin.
Christmas carols sounded from an open window a few buildings down, the accompanying piano slightly out of tune. The carolers seemed not to mind and sang on gaily, punctuating each song with laughter and applause. She raked the fabric over the washboard until her fingers were numb and every stain vanished, then cranked it through the ringer and draped it over the line.
“That you, Effie?” Mr. Whitmark appeared on the gallery dressed in only his shirtsleeves and wrinkled trousers. “It’s Christmas Eve. What are you still doing here?”
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