by Paul Collins
“I never knew that Dr. Parkman had disappeared until I read it in the Transcript,” Dr. Webster announced to the startled janitor. “I am the unknown gentleman referred to.”
IT WAS all an ordinary enough transaction, Dr. Webster explained. Like seemingly half of the West End, he had a payment to make to Dr. Parkman—in his case, a mortgage for $483.
“I counted the money down to him, on my lecture room table. He grabbed the money up, as fast as he could, and ran up two steps at a time.” As ever, Parkman had moved with impatience. “Dr. Parkman said he would go and discharge the mortgage.”
Dr. Webster had just been to the Reverend Parkman to explain all of this to him. As for where Dr. Parkman went next, well, most likely it was over the Craigie Bridge into East Cambridge, where the mortgage had been held.
“But,” the chemistry professor added, “I have not been over to the Registry of Deeds to see.”
For Littlefield, having already sunk much of his Sunday into the search, this piece of information made his next destination immediately apparent: he needed to walk along the Craigie Bridge. The span was just north of the medical school, and the point at which it crossed over to East Cambridge made it the logical route for a man headed to the Registry of Deeds. Littlefield fell in with a crony from the local customhouse, and their footsteps on the bridge crunched loudly together in the cold sunset; the Craigie was unusual in having gravel spread over its planking, and even more unusual in having a branch bridge extending out from its center, going to the state prison. Every walker who crossed the bridge from Boston faced, as they paid their toll, two paths diverging before them: one to the prison, and the other toward Harvard.
The two came up to the midbridge tollhouse in the fading light and peered in through the window of the tollkeeper’s station. Feeling generous, Littlefield paid both their fares.
Seen Dr. Parkman? he asked, handing over the coins.
Indeed a tollkeeper had. Maybe within an hour of the sightings near the Medical College, their Friday afternoon shift had seen Dr. Parkman walking over the bridge with a shabbily dressed Irishman, and what was more, the Irishman had paid their toll. It was an intriguing hint, because police returning from East Cambridge reported that Parkman hadn’t arrived at the Registry of Deeds over there. It was as if, rather ominously, Dr. Parkman had simply vanished off the Craigie Bridge. As night fell and the temperature sank further, men took to searching around the docks on either side of the river, gazing into the black and frigid waters. They found nothing.
The neighborhood men finally turned in for the evening, and Tukey’s force returned to city hall empty-handed. Clues had been pouring into the central office, though: one short-lived rumor placed Dr. Parkman in Salem, while other witnesses recalled having seen Parkman back in downtown Boston at different points along Washington Street, and in at least one case with the same mysterious and shabby companion. Another report pondered the rapid departure from Boston of two disreputable men with skulking looks, driving a carriage in haste across the South Boston Bridge and out of the city. Their descriptions—“Both had on green pants—one, a glazed cap, black whiskers, black coat—the other, brown overcoat, light goatee, black hat, and yellow vest spotted with red”—were almost as good as any the police had of Parkman himself.
So it now seemed that Dr. Parkman had walked out of the medical school and into the streets of Boston with nearly $500 in his pocket and had perhaps been spied later that afternoon with a rough-looking gentleman or two. And no witness—in any part of the city—had seen him since.
FRANCIS TUKEY awoke the next morning inside a murder scene.
He had, in fact, been waking up every morning inside a murder scene, for years now; perhaps few but the city marshal had the bravado to knowingly live in such a place. All of 48 South Russell Street—from the ceiling he stared up at upon waking, down to the cellar, where he stored his coal, and out to the parlor, where he thoughtfully considered his cases—was reputed to be haunted. And that assessment was fair enough, considering that just that last week he’d hosted a friend’s funeral there. But even before then, there’d been a very good reason for that reputation: some twenty-nine years earlier, what was now Tukey’s home had been the scene of an ax murder.
Old-timers still remembered the case well. In 1820, Michael Powers had been a hardworking Irish laborer who, in a regrettable moment of generosity, loaned money to four cousins so that they might follow him to America. Once in Boston, they denied the loans, and cannily dodged Powers in court because he, an illiterate man, hadn’t committed anything to writing. In defeat, he made a point of reconciling with them—they were family, after all—until one of his cousins was observed entering his house but never seen to reemerge. Local police officers, growing suspicious, broke in to find that neither Powers nor his cousin were anywhere to be seen. But a newly cleaned ax with hair still stuck in a crack, and some recently disturbed earth under a basement woodpile, augured what they’d find next: the cousin’s horribly mangled body, in a grave scarcely eighteen inches deep. The man had, in the end, repaid his bad loan with considerable penalties. Along with three savage blows to the back of the skull—the coroner found the wounds “large enough to pass his finger into”—the man’s face and hands were burned. The victim, the officers surmised, had been caught unawares while warming himself in front of Powers’s hearth, and struck so hard in the head that he’d pitched face-first into the fire.
Powers was apprehended just as he was booking a passage back to Dublin, carrying a trunk containing his victim’s clothes and wallet. Yet the suspect was curiously convinced that he couldn’t be prosecuted. “The most he could say,” one chronicler noted, “was, ‘no one could say I saw him do it.’” Powers discovered, to his great disappointment, that circumstantial evidence was indeed enough to send him to the scaffold.
Tukey’s new case was baffling, though; if only they could all be as simple as the murder in his basement! He’d have been perfect for that investigation—some of the marshal’s fame had come, after all, from a terrier-like knack for knowing where to dig. It was how he’d saved his man in the Dearborn Block collapse; it was how, not long before that, he’d dramatically unearthed a sum of over $1,000 buried on Boston Common, the plunder of a jewelry store robbery. Even one of his failures—digging in the basement of another house reputed to be haunted, but of which he had more earthly suspicions—had proved nearly right. He’d accidentally struck through a few beams buried in the dirt before giving up. A few weeks later, the cellar collapsed into a subterranean lair furnished with zinc blanks and a keg of suspicious looking half-dollars. The house’s “ghosts” had been counterfeiters, and Tukey had very nearly dug right in through their ceiling.
But this time Tukey was running out of places to dig. He left his house that Monday morning and had his men walk over the same grounds again and again, straining for any clues they’d missed. The cellars of Parkman’s properties turned up nothing but cold, damp earth. Charles Kingsley, still loyally searching for his boss, joined the officers and doggedly made inquiries all up and down Leverett Street, where Parkman must have walked to reach the Craigie Bridge. Nobody else could verify the tollkeeper’s story. All the other leads from later in the afternoon along Washington Street still suffered from one maddening flaw: sightings by just one person, with no other witnesses.
The last place everyone agreed Parkman had been seen was the Medical College, and so Kingsley and a couple of policemen duly trudged back and called upon Littlefield.
“We want to look around this college,” Kingsley said wearily to the janitor, who quickly motioned to Dr. Holmes to come help, “for we can’t trace the doctor anywhere but here.”
Holmes, more college dean than concerned citizen, gently remonstrated with them; of course he wanted to help find their school’s great benefactor, but the building was in fact full of dead bodies—and always had been. The memory of last year’s abortion and body-snatching scandal with Sarah Furber still stung, and thou
gh Harvard now tried rather painstakingly to acquire its cadavers legitimately, and kept them carefully on ice, the prospect of breaking them all out was not a pleasant one.
“You don’t want to haul all our subjects out of the chest, do you?” Holmes asked worriedly.
“No,” Kingsley assured him, “we want to look about the attics, and . . .” He vaguely indicated the larger building about them.
“Take them up and show them all around,” the dean told Littlefield.
They briskly searched nearly every corner of the school, from the attic down to the lecture halls, from the cellar up to Dr. Webster’s laboratory, where the professor absently let them in without so much as a word of greeting. Nothing: nothing in the school, nothing anywhere else. Officer after officer brought the same report back to the marshal. Parkman had, it seemed, vanished as completely as the vapors from one of the chemistry laboratory’s glass beakers.
Tukey returned to city hall, where the usual run of the day’s crimes washed in on their ceaseless tide of human flotsam: drunk and disorderlies, pickpockets, and the always popular crime of stealing pocket watches. Just that evening they got a report from the docks of a ship stealthily boarded and a fifteen-dollar French silver watch stolen; and then, on land, a house break-in with two more watches taken. The timepieces were easy to spirit away and sell, which was more than one could say of the entire bale of waxed twine for candlewicks also brazenly lifted from in front of a store on Milk Street. The newspaper reporters who waited around for the day’s police reports devised a fine headline for that one: “A WICK-ED CRIME.”
Yet the marshal’s attentions remained on the Parkman case as the day’s paperwork and correspondence came in. Among his letters was a grubby yellow envelope addressed to Francis Tukey, City Marshal. The marshal opened it carefully, and stared at the message scrawled inside:
Dr Sir—
You will find Dr Parkman
murdered on brooklynt
heights. yours, M.—
Captain of the Dart.
8
SOME ABERRATION OF MIND
DR. PARKMAN WAS NOT FOUND MURDERED ON “BROOKLYNT Heights.” Nor was he found murdered on Brooklyn Heights, or murdered on Brookline Heights, or murdered in any other Brook or Heights of any variety at all. Perhaps inevitably, Tukey was now receiving crank letters. Not only was much of the information coming into his office false, but some of the facts emerging about Dr. Parkman were a little too uncomfortably true.
“The supposition of those who know him best,” revealed the Boston Courier, “is, that he is laboring under some aberration of mind, and that he is wandering through woods in some adjacent town. We understand that he has occasionally been affected with slight mental derangement, during which it has been his custom to seek seclusion.”
This was news indeed to many: the Parkman family had primly left any “aberration” unmentioned in its blizzard of thousands of handbills. Now their infirmities had been thrown open to the world. Though some Boston newspapers, like the Herald, took a crusading zeal in exposés, and even engaged in subtle blackmail to withhold the publication of damaging stories, most papers kept at least some respectable distance from such revelations. But the papers of late had been feeling their influence in the city—just that day, the Transcript reported, the recently formed Independent Order of Boston Reporters had successfully lobbied for new furnishings to replace the shabby arrangements for the courtroom press. And now, with the report of Parkman’s “derangement” in the Courier, local reporters would slowly reveal, newspaper by newspaper, this painful fact.
The Parkmans did not try to deny it; there was no point now. “Brain troubles” had exacted a terrible toll across their family, not least on the doctor’s older brother, the Reverend Francis Parkman. He was, as one colleague later mused, “subject to depression, as men of mercurial and humorous disposition are apt to be,” and he’d had a full-blown breakdown for a substantial part of 1844 and 1845. Nor had his namesake son, Francis Jr., escaped the curse. Just twenty-six, the young man was surpassing his father’s fame with his newly published account, The Oregon Trail. One of his driving motives for traveling out west in the first place, though, had been to try to cure what he privately termed his “conditions of the nervous system abnormal . . . since infancy.” He’d begged his friends to warn him if, like his father and his uncle George, he began showing signs of incipient insanity in his correspondence.
Like many sufferers, Dr. George Parkman’s way of grappling with his own disordered mind had been to take up the study of the field itself. As a young scion to the family fortune, he’d toured Europe—but not to simply dawdle among nobility or the great sights. Instead, he’d visited insane asylums in Britain and Switzerland, and spent months in a women’s asylum in Paris. A week after graduating from the Medical College in 1814, Dr. Parkman had published a remarkably forward-thinking booklet, Proposals for Establishing a Retreat for the Insane. The insane, he argued, did not benefit from shackling and solitary confinement; they needed “salutary exercise and employments.” Nor did they deserve censure for their mad acts; these came from palpable physical alterations of the brain itself and required treatment by doctors. Parkman helped lead the creation of the Massachusetts Lunatic Asylum and exerted care in its every detail, down to the design of its beds and bolted-down furniture. The facility was advertised as an institution for the well-to-do, “a mile from Boston, on a gravelly eminence, commanding an extensive amphitheater of prospect.”
Even as his career eventually turned away from medicine and to expanding the family fortune, Dr. Parkman’s ruthless property development hid a lingering tenderness for the plight of the insane. He still testified as an expert in murder trials, a lonely voice of caution in a world that bundled off homicidal madmen to the scaffold. Derangement was a vulnerability whose origin, Parkman explained, was no more one’s fault than the color of one’s eyes or the line of one’s nose: “Temperaments, features, humors, are transmitted; ferocity by tigers and leopards, mildness by sheep and doves.”
This was also true of suicidal impulses, which could grab even the healthiest of men. “Almost everybody is occasionally indifferent to life,” Dr. Parkman mused. “People on an eminence feel a strong propensity to leap down.”
And now, as his trail went cold, his family had to consider the painful possibility that Dr. Parkman—perhaps from the Craigie Bridge, perhaps from the Medical College’s riverside grounds—had finally made that leap, and drowned in the frigid Charles River. Just as much as the fabled Parkman wealth, George had inherited the family’s frailties; and in thousands of handbills to be printed and posted across the city, the family now revealed both.
SPECIAL NOTICE!
$3000 REWARD.
Dr. George Parkman, a well known citizen of Boston, left his residence, No. 8 Walnut Street, on Friday last; he is 60 years of age, about 5 feet 9 inches high, grey hair, thin face, with a scar under his chin, light complexion, and usually walks very fast. He was dressed in a dark frock coat, dark pantaloons, purple silk vest, with dark figured black stock and black hat.
As he may have wandered from home in consequence of some sudden aberration of mind, being perfectly well when he left his house; or, as he had with him a large sum of money, he may have been foully dealt with; the above reward will be paid for information which will lead to his discovery if alive; or for the detection and conviction of the perpetrators of any injury that may have been done him.
A suitable reward will be paid for the discovery of his body.
Information may be given to the City Marshal.
ROBERT G. SHAW
Three thousand dollars. It was a staggering amount—as much as one of the city’s detectives earned in five years. What had been a local mystery occupying the police and concerned citizens now became a frenzied all-out search of house, riverbank, and woodland.
THE CLUES kept coming into Tukey’s office.
I saw him at six o’clock that evening, a freedman insisted
. It was over by the Harrison Avenue church. This man was a better witness than most: he’d once been a messenger for the Registry of Deeds and knew the city’s landlords by sight.
In all these sightings from later that Friday afternoon, though, Parkman never spoke, and that left the leads open to mistaken identity. Then again, perhaps such silence hinted at the nature of his disappearance. Searches for missing persons generally fell into one of three categories: they didn’t want to be found, they did want to be found, or they were too distraught to know what they wanted at all. Each type dictated a different kind of search.
Escaped slaves didn’t want to be found; neither did escaped apprentices. Debtors didn’t want to be found; indeed, the recently lamented Edgar Allan Poe, in his reckless youth, had fled Virginia creditors by living among Boston’s docks as one “Henri Le Rennet.” Runaway young men didn’t want to be found. Tukey had recently had a case involving a sixteen-year-old boy who vanished between home and school one morning; the lad was found in New York, trying to book a passage to California to hit it rich in the gold fields. And young runaway girls? Some stealthily left to obtain a midwife or an abortion and never made it home, as the sad case at Harvard the previous summer had shown. Newspaper notices for missing sixteen-year-olds that concluded with the phrase “her friends feel much alarmed” hinted, without ever saying it frankly, of such sorrows. But sometimes it was simply elopement: Tukey once found a sixteen-year-old girl by going to the house of her beau, a forty-year-old widower who boasted that he’d hidden her perfectly. Tukey promptly broke into the fellow’s house to find the girl in his front room. She was sent on her way home that same evening.
Newspaper ads and ship’s manifests had long been essential tools in tracking down errant souls. But these days, ticket masters at railroads were also the eyes of public watchfulness—it seemed as if all the population passed under their gaze at some point—and thanks to the telegraph, the stations could be alerted instantly.
