by Paul Collins
“Go ahead with it,” Bigelow told the janitor, and returned to his plaster heads.
Ephraim wandered the halls of the college, unsure. Bigelow had been in his job for only three weeks, and what did any new professor know? What protection was his word for a mere janitor? He spotted J.B.S. Jackson toiling away in a side room, and though Dr. Jackson had been on the faculty for only a couple of years, he was already experienced in such matters. When, the previous summer, Littlefield had gotten mixed up in the abortion scandal involving the cadaver of Sarah Furber, it was Dr. Jackson who’d been among the first to spot something very amiss with her body.
The janitor quietly confided his plans to Jackson, and the doctor weighed the prospect of the school being dragged through the mud once again. What, he asked, did Littlefield intend to do if he found anything?
“Go to Dr. Holmes,” the janitor said innocently.
“You had better not go to him,” the professor advised. This was not a matter for their dean. Holmes was their pillar in the community and in the country; and even more delicately, he had a new book of poetry coming out the very next day. Nor was it a matter for their ambitious new colleague tending to the busts upstairs. No, better to bring in the old man.
“Go to the elder Dr. Bigelow, in Summer Street,” Jackson continued. “Then come and tell me. If I am not at home, leave your name on my slate, and—I shall understand it.”
If Webster detected even a hint of the excavations, he would most certainly understand what was going on—all too well. One wrong move, and Dr. Parkman might not be the only fresh body found in the medical school.
“Mr. Littlefield, I feel dreadfully about this,” Dr. Jackson warned. “Go through that wall before you sleep tonight.”
BY THE early afternoon, Webster had left his lab. Littlefield slipped out of the building and over to the Fuller foundry down the street, aware that trying again to bash through a brick wall with a hatchet and chisel clearly wasn’t going to work. He didn’t just need the right tools, though; he also needed the right excuse for the tools. How, without letting his real task on, could he explain that he required demolition tools in a building where a man had apparently disappeared?
The steady drip and drain of water in Webster’s lab gave one hint: plumbing. It was the perfect excuse. Since Cochituate water had first been piped along this street, Harvard doctors in particular had become great advocates of the salubrious effects of the frigid water. Basins installed in bedrooms and offices were just the thing; better still, one observer at the school drolly observed, were the showers “which poured a feeble stream of cold water upon the shoulders of those whose systems could stand the shock.” Running a new service into yet another room of the college was an entirely plausible excuse, and Fuller would be the logical man to ask for tools; he knew all about such matters, for his foundry had produced many of the cast-iron pipes for the city’s water mains.
The janitor accosted Leonard Fuller and dutifully explained how he needed a crowbar to knock a hole through a wall—for a water line, you understand. The excuse hung awkwardly in the air; Fuller understood very well indeed. There was still a reward on offer for Parkman’s body, after all, and everyone knew that the college was the last place where there’d been a confirmed sighting of the old man. The laconic foundry owner regarded Ephraim with a long look of bemusement.
I need it for a water line, Ephraim insisted.
“I guess you do,” Fuller finally said, and slid the tool over to the janitor.
It did not take long for Charles Kingsley, still doggedly making his rounds that afternoon as Parkman’s right-hand man, to hear the foundry gossip about Harvard’s peculiar new variety of plumbing. It was just another Parkman rumor, of course, and the day had not been lacking in those. One of the better ones had come over lunch, with Cambridge’s postmaster hand-delivering a letter addressed to Marshal Tukey. The envelope’s extraordinarily crude lettering, seemingly written with a twig, had immediately drawn the postman’s attention, so that he’d personally walked it across the river and to city hall. When opened, it had revealed a disturbing scrawled-out message:
Dr Parkman was took on Bord the ship herculan and this is all I dare say or I shal be kiled. Est Cambridge one of the men gave me his watch but I was feard to keep it and throwd it in water rightside the road to the long brige to Boston
This was a frustrating clue; there was no “Herculan,” but there was indeed a schooner named Herculean—and it had set sail from Boston Harbor the day before. Its crew would be an unlikely gang of kidnappers: they’d shipped out on unremarkable cotton runs to New Orleans, and earlier that year they’d braved a hurricane to valiantly save a sinking ship’s crew on the high seas. Still, Dr. Parkman’s watch alone had a $100 reward on it; even the hint of a lead might bring out some rivermen to drag the pilings around the bridge yet again.
Kingsley had been through Webster’s rooms twice, but with the latest news of Littlefield’s very odd job, they bore visiting again. Joined by a police officer, he crossed North Grove Street and walked up the steps to the Medical College. Kingsley pulled on the door; it didn’t budge.
Locked. The janitor was taking no chances.
Kingsley quietly placed his ear up against the cold stone of the school’s exterior and listened intently. Faintly, in the subterranean distance, he could make out the steady report of metal striking brickwork.
Clink—clink—clink.
LITTLEFIELD WAS finally making some progress when he heard the hammer pounding over his head: one, two, three, four. The signal. Webster was coming. The janitor scrambled out of the crawl space, his overalls muddy and, once he was back in the heated building, damp with sweat. He’d already shed his usual vest and jacket for the job. Had it not been for his building maintenance duties, his appearance would have been enough to alert anyone; as it was, it was damning enough.
Caroline was waiting for him upstairs, chagrined.
“I’ve made a fool of you this time,” she admitted. “Two gentlemen called here, and I thought one was Dr. Webster; but they are Mr. Kingsley, and Mr. Starkweather. They are at the door now.”
Littlefield slid the bolt on the front door, and—still cautious not to let anyone in—stepped outside to meet Kingsley and Officer Starkweather on the front steps.
What private places, Kingsley asked significantly, have not yet been searched in this building?
Why, the privy, the janitor replied.
The two were tactful enough not to let on that they’d just been eavesdropping through the wall. Now they were ready to take a more direct route: surely they could simply break through the lock of Webster’s privy?
“Let us go into his laboratory,” Kingsley urged Littlefield.
Kingsley could hardly be blamed, perhaps, for not understanding that this was not like his employer’s squalid tenements. This was Harvard’s medical school, and one couldn’t simply go about breaking down doors and prying out locks, and certainly not without a warrant. Certain proprieties had to be maintained; these gentlemen were professors.
“Can we not get in, then?” Officer Starkweather pressed.
“No, Dr. Webster has locked it, and has got the key,” the janitor said flatly.
The pair left empty-handed. But then George Trenholm walked up—another officer making his rounds. Littlefield had known George for a few years, and trusted him enough to wave him inside and tell him of his plans.
Here—he pointed out the entryway by the dissecting room—that’s where the wall was so hot that I thought the building would catch fire.
Trenholm instinctively put his hand against the wall, though it had long since gone cold again. There was nothing more to see, and so they strolled out back outside; being called up from beneath the building had simply wasted what precious time Littlefield had to keep digging.
Mrs. Littlefield came bustling over to them.
“You have just saved your bacon,” she reported. “Dr. Webster has just passed in.”
&nb
sp; The doctor was none the wiser. He’d arrived to find the building unlocked and hadn’t run into Mr. Littlefield and Officer Trenholm snooping about. Blithely unaware, he collected the long-neglected grapevines from the hallway and dragged them into his laboratory. The door remained slightly ajar for a brief moment—and then he reemerged and locked it again. When the doctor exited the building, Littlefield and Trenholm were still standing outside—just a janitor talking to the passing officer on his beat, idly gossiping about Parkman’s disappearance.
Dr. Webster gamely joined in their conversation.
“What about that twenty-dollar bill?” he asked.
Officer Trenholm was puzzled. What twenty-dollar bill?
Why, Webster explained, the one collected on the bridge—the one an Irishman used to a pay a one-cent toll. He’d just been called over to Marshal Tukey’s, in fact, to see if he could identify it as one he’d given to Dr. Parkman. But, alas—it was just another twenty-dollar bill. Who knew whether it was one of those he’d handed to Parkman?
“I told him I could not swear to it,” Webster admitted.
It was all most regrettable; so many clues, and yet the disappearance seemed bound to remain a mystery.
Well, good day, he bade them, and walked off.
The pair watched him disappear down North Grove Street. Come back in twenty minutes, Littlefield told Trenholm—and with that, he ran over to Fuller’s for more tools, then slipped back inside the Medical College and down through the trap door again.
It was four in the afternoon by then, and the job was getting harder as he got closer to breaking through. A draft was pulling cold air through the hole in the bricks, nearly blowing out the flame of his lamp; and he knew that once he got inside the privy, there were trenches where river water could collect to the height of a man. But there was no telling when Webster would come back, so the janitor threw himself into smashing away at the bricks, now with hammer and chisel, then with a crowbar, until the hole was just wide enough. He dropped his tools and grabbed his lamp: now was the time.
Littlefield peered inside the opening and thrust his flickering light into the terrible darkness before him.
Part IV
THE ACCUSED
13
PISTOLS DRAWN
DR. BIGELOW WAS JUST SITTING DOWN TO HIS DINNER AS dusk fell over Boston. Soon all the merchants around the city would begin to lock up their businesses for the night, an act of no small fascination to the doctor. He had a fondness for the art of lock picking and owned what one visitor to his home described as “a whole bushel of locks” to practice on. Not for any practical purpose, mind you. Some men whittled; Bigelow picked. With a good set of filed keys, he had found, you could spring even a difficult lock open with a satisfying click. The coming weekend meant a brief respite from doctoring, from the Medical College lectures: time for his locks, time for his painting, time for a good meal.
You have a visitor in your office, he was informed.
Visitors, always visitors. He set aside his napkin and trudged down to his waiting room. There was no patient for him. Instead, there was Ephraim Littlefield—disheveled, and stained with dirt, sweat, and white mortar dust.
Ephraim’s hands were trembling.
“Oh,” he repeated wildly, almost babbling. “I have found him. I have found him!”
His meaning was plain enough; and all the janitor’s years of shadowy dealings in cadavers rose up against him. The professor seized Littlefield by the collar and rattled the sobbing man.
“Damn you!” Dr. Bigelow roared. “What did you have to do with it, Littlefield?”
“Nothing!” he protested. “Nothing!”
What must surely come next was clear: the scandal upon the Harvard name, the insult on the grieving donor’s family, the board meetings to follow. It was all over; the locals would surely tear the college to pieces now.
Bigelow released his grip on the hysterical janitor and let the man drop.
Go back to the college, he told Littlefield. I’ll get Marshal Tukey.
The professor marched down the darkened streets to city hall, where he found the marshal, Kingsley, the lawyer James Blake, and assorted officers all mulling over their dwindling search. There were still more leads, every day: leads to other states, leads to other cities, leads that led straight out to sea. Or maybe it was a decidedly local crime. Just the night before, highwaymen had held up a cab on the bridge by the college—jumping out, with one wresting the horse’s reins and the other throwing open the carriage door and demanding money. They were deterred only when the driver shot the top off one robber’s hat. So there was another new lead: What if these same highwaymen had intercepted Parkman as he’d crossed the bridge to Cambridge?
You can stop looking.
The news from Dr. Bigelow sank in for a moment. Then, Tukey grabbed his revolver, and the men headed out into the night.
OFFICER TRENHOLM had already beat them to the scene.
The police arrived at the Medical College and crowded into Littlefield’s modest apartment, where they found Trenholm waiting for them. He had, as promised, come back that afternoon, just twenty minutes after talking with the janitor, only to find that the terrified fellow had already run off to fetch Dr. Bigelow. It was Mrs. Littlefield who let him in and led him to the trap door—asking, concernedly, Are you not afraid to go down there?—and when he wasn’t, George Trenholm became the second man to venture alone into the breach in Webster’s brick vault.
There was, he grimly confirmed to his boss, something to Littlefield’s report.
The group swelled with more officers, and along with the janitor they filed down the hallway to the hatch in the floor. One by one, they descended through the trap door and into the crawl space. As the slope of the dirt made the roof low to their heads, they crouched down to reach the hole. Tukey had his right-hand enforcer Derastus Clapp by his side, and he asked the detective to pass him the lamp. Then the marshal peered into the vault.
A steady stream was falling inside; the Cochituate water had been left running into the vault, wastefully pouring back into ground already soaked by the river, where it endlessly washed away—what, exactly? Follow the water down in the beam of light, to where it spattered the bottom of the foul brick enclosure: there. In the light glistened what might appear, perhaps, to be heaped cuts of discarded butcher’s meat. It was not so easy, at first glance, to discern what variety of creature they had been sliced from.
Dr. Bigelow, the marshal inquired, is this, was this, a human?
It is, Dr. Bigelow agreed. It was.
And was Harvard’s medical school, the marshal politely asked the janitor, generally in the habit of storing bodies in the toilet?
“No,” Littlefield answered.
Somewhere overhead, a board creaked in the darkness, and a realization stabbed through the assembled men. The policemen, looking at one another and at Littlefield and Bigelow, registered the fact that every single one of them had descended through the trap door.
They had not left a lookout upstairs.
“That is Webster,” one hissed.
Another creak; and then a footfall.
“He is overhead,” another whispered.
They could be locked down here for the entire weekend. Worse, Littlefield knew that Webster kept a loaded pistol in the lab; the doctor sometimes experimented with batteries and electrical wires rigged to set off the gun. If desperate enough, the doctor could pick them all off one by one as they emerged through the trap door.
Marshal Tukey pulled out his revolver and indicated to Officers Clapp and Trenholm to follow. Padding to the trap door, they stealthily leapt up into—silence.
No sign of him. But someone was in the building.
The men quietly split up, weapons drawn—Tukey toward the lab, the others upstairs to the lecture halls. The marshal slipped into a storeroom, gun drawn, yet somehow outmatched: the arrays of retorts, flasks, and stoppered beakers were, in the darkness, an arsenal of glass a
nd acids. If there should be a crouching figure among them—no, nobody there. But one suspiciously closed-up cabinet, gingerly opened, revealed a most unscientific collection of bottles: the professor’s hidden store of wine and liquor.
Of their owner, there was no sign.
Clapp and Trenholm crept up the stairs, past the display cases in the empty school lobby, and up to the doorways that, in the daylight, so many students had blithely passed through with no thoughts of death—save for those of their assigned cadavers. The doors swung into the dark, vacant rooms; inside were benign tools of learning, now phantasmal in the moonlight. The demonstration skeletons grinned unnervingly from the bare lecture stage as the pair checked the sloping auditorium rows, ready to fire; beneath the seats were only the blank stares of the phrenological busts that had been stowed earlier that afternoon.
They were alone—just them, the mute plaster heads, and the skeletons. If Webster had already been here, he’d clearly taken flight. And if he would not come to them—then they would have to go to him.
IT WAS about seven that evening when the carriage pulled up just short of Dr. Webster’s house in Cambridge. Best to keep it slightly out of sight and not alarm their suspect, Officer Clapp thought; he told Officers Starkweather and Spurr to hold back. A carriage stopping in front of the professor’s house and three officers marching up would arouse suspicion, but one of them on foot would not.
Clapp walked up to the house alone, only to find the doctor himself already outside. Dr. Webster had stepped into the front yard, still in his slippers, to show a visitor to the gate; Clapp caught up to him as he was turning to go back inside. The doctor recognized the old officer immediately.
“How do you do, Mr. Clapp?” he asked amiably.
We’re searching the college again, the officer explained apologetically. Could you come assist us for a moment?
It was a terrible inconvenience, of course, but it had now been a week to the day since the disappearance; there was some due diligence to show to Parkman’s family before winding things down. Webster, of course, was only too glad to help; the family, he remarked, must be in great pain. The pair went briefly into the professor’s study, where Webster gamely pulled on his coat, hat, and shoes.