Louisa and the Missing Heiress

by Anna Maclean

  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.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Case for Murder

  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.

  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.”