Let the Dead Keep Their Secrets

by Rosemary Simpson

  “Go on.”

  “Dr. Worthington told us she and the baby were already in the coffin when he signed the death certificate. He didn’t examine either of them. They’d been washed and dressed and photographed by Bartholomew Monroe while Worthington was taking his nap.”

  “Which he’d never done before, according to him.”

  “He doesn’t have any reason to lie.”

  “Except embarrassment.”

  “Suppose he had been given something to make him sleep. He did say he had coffee and sandwiches because he’d been up all night. If the coffee was strong enough, it could easily hide the taste of whatever was used to knock him out.”

  “Laudanum?”

  “Possibly, but he might have detected the bitterness, even if only a few drops were used. It was probably something else, something that works more quickly and doesn’t have such a distinctive taste. I think he was deliberately kept away from Ethel’s body. If that’s true, there has to be a reason for it.”

  “What are you suggesting, Prudence?”

  “The bodies need to be examined by someone who knows how to look for signs of unnatural death.”

  “That would take a court order, which we have no grounds to request. And neither body has been embalmed. We’d have to move quickly.”

  “We’ll be in Philadelphia tomorrow.”

  “Are you suggesting what I think you are?”

  “Can you think of anything else? We had only a few moments to look at Ethel and the baby before Sorensen came into the parlor, and there wasn’t anything to see except their faces and hands.”

  “The crypt will be locked.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem for either of us,” Prudence said. “Aaron Sorensen has profited financially from two wives who died in childbirth.” She fanned out across the desk the cartes de visite and cabinet photographs created by Bartholomew Monroe.

  “Are you thinking there may have been others?” Geoffrey asked.

  “I am.”

  “Then maybe it’s time we set about proving it.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Laurel Hill Cemetery was on the northwest side of Philadelphia, seventy-four acres of rolling countryside overlooking the Schuylkill River. Modeled on Père Lachaise in Paris, the cemetery was a themed garden of narrow, winding roadways and landscaped meadows dotted with commemorative headstones, elaborate crypts in iron-fenced family plots, and sculpted statuary as large and ornate as anything commissioned for a public park. Thousands of visitors thronged to Laurel Hill every year: some to visit the tombs of family or the famous, others to enjoy the swaths of green grass beneath towering trees.

  Prudence and Geoffrey hired a small buggy and joined the procession of horse-drawn vehicles winding its way through the cemetery grounds.

  “This reminds me of Central Park,” Prudence said. “I hadn’t thought of a cemetery as a place one comes to amuse oneself. Look, Geoffrey, they’re picnicking over there.” She pointed to a family group seated on blankets spread out on the grass. If they had come to pay their respects to a deceased relative, they certainly seemed lighthearted about it.

  “I don’t know that we’ll be able to do what we planned,” Geoffrey said, flicking the whip lightly over the back of the horse. He was careful to make a snapping sound, but not touch the animal’s coat.

  “I doubt we’ll be noticed,” Prudence countered.

  “An empty buggy in front of an unlocked family crypt?”

  “That’s why I brought flowers and the tools.” Prudence had purchased several floral displays from a shop near the cemetery gates. At a mercantile store she bought a broom, a bucket, and a pair of secateurs, all of which she planned to display prominently once they found the Caswell mausoleum. The man from whom she bought them asked if she was on her way to Laurel Hill. When she replied in the affirmative, he volunteered the information that he, too, had family interred there. He slipped a small trowel into her bucket with his compliments. It seemed that although the cemetery’s landscaping services were excellent, relatives of the deceased always added a few touches of their own.

  The Caswell family slept in a miniature Greek temple faced with four Ionic pillars beneath a triangular typhanon adorned with winged symbols of flight. Heavy metal doors, locked against intruders, guarded the interior.

  While Geoffrey secured the buggy’s brakes and put a feedbag on the horse, Prudence carried the flowers and tools to the temple’s porch, stacking them in plain sight. She moved with efficient purpose, as though she had been to this tomb before and knew exactly what needed to be done. She hoped that none of the passersby would know and remark on the fact that a coffin had been placed inside only the day before. Glancing around as she moved between buggy and crypt, she decided that they didn’t seem to be attracting any undue attention. It was a bright, sunny, early March day, just warm enough to herald the promise of spring to Philadelphians seeking an escape from the indoor winter fug of cramped, coal-heated rooms.

  Geoffrey positioned his body to shield the lock on which he was working. Prudence stood close beside him, holding a floral arrangement that further hid what he was doing. “They must have oiled this recently,” he said, his pick soundlessly working the tumblers. “Probably when Samuel Caswell was interred.” The heavily embossed metal door swung loose in his hand. “Leave a few things outside,” he instructed, “so it looks like we’ve nothing to hide. I’ll lock the door behind us, just in case.”

  The interior of the mausoleum was damp and cold. A row of windows just beneath the roofline allowed enough natural light in to let them get their bearings. A ring in the floor told them that a burial chamber had been excavated below ground. Six names were chiseled into the marble blocks around it; dates indicated that at least three of them belonged to men who had gone off to war and met their deaths on the battlefield. A small marble altar surmounted by a pair of weeping angels stood opposite the doorway, three granite shelves to each side. Two of the shelves had been sealed off, names and dates carved into the marble facing. The coffin in which Ethel Sorensen lay rested on a raised bier just in front of the altar, her father’s coffin beside it.

  “The custom in some places is to leave the deceased where the coffin can be touched and wept over until the first anniversary of the death. Then it’s moved onto one of these upper shelves and sealed in or entombed down below.” Prudence’s father, interred in the MacKenzie family crypt, had recently made that final step on the journey to eternity.

  “We do things faster in the South,” Geoffrey said. His memories were of brick vaults and bodies that were hastily buried as soon as the coffin could be knocked together. Summer was an especially bad time. So long ago, yet he’d forgotten not a single sight or sound. The only thing that saved him was the rigid control he exercised over the worst memories; even the best ones were too painful to be permitted to surface.

  Ethel’s coffin was of highly polished oak, its hardware gleaming brass. The nameplate that included her birth and death dates told them she had been twenty-three years old. Male infant was engraved on a smaller brass plate. Aaron Sorensen had not bothered to attach a name to the child who never drew breath.

  The lid had been screwed down in six places to keep the wood from warping during the year the coffin might be in view. Geoffrey moved methodically from one brass screw to the next, slipping each into his pocket as he removed it. “Light the lantern,” he instructed. “What’s coming through those windows isn’t bright enough for us to see what we’re looking for.”

  Prudence held the lantern at shoulder height while Geoffrey lifted the coffin lid. Ethel and her child looked just as they had the day before, laid out in the parlor of their home surrounded by banks of flowers. A faint whiff of decomposition hung over their bodies, not unpleasant yet, but hinting at the putrefaction to come.

  Geoffrey took out a handkerchief and dipped it into the water that dampened the bottom of the floral arrangement. Bending over and holding his breath, he wiped the makeup paste and pow
der from Edith’s nostrils.

  “What are you looking for?” Prudence asked, holding the lantern steady so he could see what he was doing.

  “There,” Geoffrey said. “Do you see those faint purple marks on either side of her nose? Someone pinched hard on the nostrils while she was still alive. If you look closely enough, you’ll see bruising around her mouth where a hand was pressed down on her lips to keep her from opening her mouth.” He rolled back the lid on one of her eyes. Tiny red pinpoints indicated burst capillaries. They had seen them before in the photographs made from the glass negatives Prudence had stolen from Bartholomew Monroe’s studio.

  “I smell laudanum. Even under all of the other odors, that acrid bitterness is unmistakable.”

  “Her body is beginning to break down and release it. If I were a poet, I would say it’s giving up its secrets.”

  “She was murdered.”

  “Helped along by doses of laudanum she probably never knew she was being given. And when that didn’t accomplish the deed quickly enough, deprived of the air she needed to breathe.”

  “Dr. Worthington told me the baby died during birth because Ethel didn’t have the strength to push him out. From what I know of its effects, laudanum could interfere with a normal labor if enough was ingested to stop the muscles from contracting. Compton’s Medical Guide warns of just such a danger.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to enroll in the Women’s Medical College instead of battering at the bar?” Geoffrey asked.

  “I might do both.” Prudence smiled as she said it.

  Geoffrey lowered the coffin lid and screwed it tight again. Then he turned toward the mahogany casket holding the remains of Samuel Caswell. “Ethel’s father has been dead for two weeks,” he said. “Sorensen is careful not to allow his victims to remain able to accuse him. He refused to allow Ethel to be embalmed. He would have done the same if he had anything to do with this death. The sooner the bodies of his victims decompose and become skeletal remains, the safer he feels.”

  “Catherine was embalmed, Geoffrey. Old Dr. Norbert wrote that he was furious because she and baby Ingrid were coffined before he signed the death certificate. I’m positive he said they were both embalmed. I remember his nephew telling me that it was done right there at the house, and that arsenic was used. It’s what they did with the battlefield dead they managed to ship home during the war.”

  “I wonder if the mortuary attendants assumed the husband wanted the bodies preserved and began the procedure without checking with him. Sorensen never would have allowed it to happen, had he been able to stop it. He wants the physical evidence of his guilt to disappear.”

  “I think we should open the coffin, Geoffrey. It’s the only opportunity we have, and if we don’t do it now, we’ll never know.”

  He handed Prudence a clean handkerchief and tied the one he’d used on Ethel’s face over his own mouth and nostrils. The odor they expected began to seep out as soon as the first few screws were removed and the coffin lid loosened. It wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t as bad as they’d feared.

  Ethel’s father was a painfully thin man with the knobby knuckles and twisted fingers of someone who suffered from rheumatism. The flesh had loosened around his facial bones, his mouth sagged open, and the lids over his eyes had begun to sink. He may have been handsome in his younger years, but age and affliction had taken their toll. Death could not have been unexpected; he might even have welcomed it.

  Geoffrey moved quickly, lifting the eyelids while Prudence held the lantern as close as she could. Samuel Caswell’s eyes showed more damage than his daughter’s; in addition to pinpoints of blood they could clearly see the spiderweb effect Jacob Riis had described in the crime scenes he had photographed.

  “What do you think?” Prudence asked.

  “I think Sorensen repeats what’s been successful. He may have drugged Ethel’s father just enough to make it difficult for him to resist, but he certainly cut off the man’s air. If he was already a semi-invalid, he may have received his son-in-law’s visit from his bed. If that’s what happened, I’d hypothesize a pillow over the face and strong arms to hold it down. No one the wiser, once the sheets were straightened and the pillow slipped back under the victim’s head. Sorensen could tell a housekeeper or butler that the master was sleeping peacefully and be gone from the house hours before it was found that Caswell had died.”

  “And if he was as ill as everyone believed him to be, the death would not be a surprise. I can almost hear someone saying it was a blessing he went peacefully in his sleep.”

  Geoffrey screwed the coffin lid shut again and Prudence extinguished the lantern. Both handkerchiefs went into Geoffrey’s coat pocket before his pick unlocked the crypt door. As soon as it opened and they stepped out into the fresh air, Prudence reached for the broom she’d left leaning on the outside wall.

  Now that they were safely out of the crypt, she shuddered with a delayed reaction to what they had done and seen. Geoffrey had tried to prepare her, but the reality was only slightly less shocking than what her imagination had pictured. “Have we attracted any attention?” she asked, head down, sweeping energetically.

  “Not as far as I can tell,” Geoffrey answered, “but I don’t think it’s a good idea to linger.” He looked around, then quickly placed the flowers at two neighboring graves. The bucket and secateurs went into the buggy, followed by Prudence’s broom. They’d dispose of them somewhere along the road winding out of the cemetery. “We don’t want to leave evidence that anyone was here,” he said.

  “I wonder how many laws we broke today,” Prudence mused as Geoffrey clucked the horse into motion.

  “Probably only a few, but that doesn’t count flouting city ordinances, cemetery regulations, and social customs. Have you considered that you’re in danger of being disbarred before you’re even admitted to the practice of law?”

  “You’ll be disbarred with me,” Prudence said.

  “I was a Pinkerton. We don’t get caught.”

  * * *

  “How sure are you of what you’ve just told us?” Malcolm Caswell was a senior partner in the law firm of Caswell, Benton, and Farrell. He was also the late Samuel Caswell’s cousin and godfather to Ethel Sorensen. Halfway through Geoffrey’s recital of suspicions, he asked his son to join them. “Arthur did most of the legwork on the estate,” he explained. “If there are irregularities, he’ll know where to look for them.”

  Geoffrey had taken the precaution of telling Claire that he and Prudence planned to visit the Philadelphia law firm that handled the Caswell family affairs. She immediately gave her written consent to disclose whatever information might be needed to persuade the lawyers that the deaths of the two wives were not isolated events.

  “Can you tell us how Ethel met Aaron Sorensen?” Geoffrey asked. “How long they knew one another before they married? What her father thought of his son-in-law? Anything that will allow us to draw parallels.”

  “I can probably tell you more about Ethel than my father can,” Arthur Caswell said. “For a while we were as close as brother and sister.” He paused for a moment before continuing. “By the time I came home from Harvard Law, she’d just about withdrawn entirely from society. Her father didn’t notice because he began cutting off social contacts years ago. He had been ill nearly all his life and he missed his wife more than any other man I’ve ever known. So he simply gave up. He turned Ethel over to the care of housekeepers and governesses and thought that fulfilled his fatherly responsibilities. Isolated as they were, neither of them had any defenses against someone like Aaron Sorensen.”

  “You had reservations about him from the beginning?”

  “I did,” the younger Caswell said. “No one in the family met him until it was too late. He was clever that way. He used his business travel to make excuses not to meet us. Ethel told me that he spun her some romantic nonsense about not wanting their special love to be diminished by having to share it with others. He convinced her they sh
ould be married in private because a society wedding would be injurious to her father’s health. I don’t think he told her they would be living in New York City until after the honeymoon. She never came back to Philadelphia after the marriage, not even when it became obvious to all of us that her father’s health was worsening. Aaron came in her place, to spare her the rigors of travel. He got her with child almost immediately, and if what you say is true, it was all part of a scheme to rob her of her inheritance.”

  “Did she ever write you?”

  “If she did, Aaron would have seen to it that her letters never made it into the mail. He cut her off from her family so effectively that she might as well have been living in another country. I went to visit her in New York once, but there was no way to be sure he was out of town when I did. He welcomed me as though there’d never been an effort to keep her apart from us, but I didn’t see Ethel that afternoon. She sent word via her maid that she was too ill to come downstairs, and when I said I’d go up to her, the maid sputtered out some story about her mistress being asleep. It was as plain as the nose on your face what was happening. I never thought he meant her harm, though. I wouldn’t have left her there with him if I suspected that. I thought he was overprotective and perhaps jealous of anyone she was fond of, but I wanted to believe he would mellow after they’d been married for a while. After the child came, he would have another human being to distract him. If you’re right, I’ll never forgive myself for being so wrong and so blind.”

  “Can you tell me what happened to the family fortune?” Geoffrey asked.

  “My cousin’s will has been probated, so it’s public record—” the senior Caswell began.

  “Even if it hadn’t been, I’d tell you everything I know,” his son interrupted. “Samuel may have been living in his own world of illness and loss, but he’d never been anything but careful with the wealth he inherited. He considered it to be in trust for future generations. He was diagnosed with rheumatism as a very young man, so he never expected to live a long life. He made provisions for Ethel before she was born.”