A bucket of ashes

by P. B. Ryan

  Don’t think about it.

  “Constable,” Cyril said, “must you be so graphic? Miss Sweeney is his sister, after all, and—”

  “It’s all right, Cyril,” Nell said. She would rather Bryce spoke frankly then to pick and choose what he told him.

  Bryce said, “Leatherby, the coroner, ordered an autopsy, which is required in cases of accidental death, so a local surgeon did it that night.”

  “Which surgeon?” Cyril asked.

  “Dr. Monk. You know him?”

  “I know all the doctors on the Cape.” A vague answer, no doubt deliberately so. As Nell recalled, Cyril had little respect for the abilities of Chauncey Monk, who’d gotten his training through wartime apprenticeship rather than medical school. “Did the autopsy turn up anything significant?”

  “Nah, he died from the fire.”

  “The fire or the smoke?” Nell asked, hoping it was the latter.

  “Monk didn’t say.”

  And you didn’t ask. How very unsurprising.

  “I don’t suppose you get too many murder cases in this neck of the woods,” Nell said.

  “This would be my first,” Bryce replied. “There hasn’t been anybody hanged on the Cape in fifty years.”

  “Is my brother’s body still in the mortuary?” she asked, hoping he hadn’t been buried in some paupers’ cemetery.

  Chief Bryce looked down, scratching his chin. “Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s still there, but—”

  “Well, that’s something.” Turning to Cyril, Nell said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to visit the mortuary after we leave here, and then St. Catherine’s in East Falmouth, so that I can see to his final arrangements.”

  “That should make Claire Gilmartin happy,” said Cyril. “While I was examining her yesterday, she seemed very concerned that he be buried in consecrated ground. She’s extremely pious, and a bit... not simple, but quite naïve. She said it wouldn’t be right to deny him a proper burial with a priest officiating just because he was a criminal, that God loves sinners just as much as He loves the rest of us.”

  “How did she know he was Catholic?” Nell asked.

  “Murphy?” he said. “It would be my guess.”

  Chief Bryce, who’d been following this exchange with an oddly strained expression, said, “I, uh, I don’t think you’re gonna be able to have him buried.”

  “But I’m his next of kin,” Nell said.

  “Yeah, but see, the body’s already been sold.”

  “Sold?”

  “I should have known,” muttered Cyril.

  “It’s been embalmed and sold to Harvard Medical School to be anatomized,” Bryce said. “It’s being shipped up to Boston next—”

  “My brother’s body is not going anywhere,” Nell said slowly, her voice quivering ever so slightly as she strove to contain her fury, “except to St. Catherine’s to be buried in the churchyard next to my mother and the rest of my brothers and sisters. God help you or anyone else who tries to prevent that.”

  “Hey, it was Packer and Monk that arranged for the sale,” Bryce said. “Talk to them.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Cyril. “You can’t dissect a body that’s been autopsied. Well, you can, but it wouldn’t be much good for teaching purposes, with all the organs removed.”

  “I understand Dr. Monk made an effort to disturb the remains as little as possible for that reason,” Bryce said.

  “Did they even try to find out whether my brother had any family?” Nell demanded heatedly. “Or did they just—”

  “It’s all right, Nell,” said Cyril, patting her back. “We’ll go to Packer’s and—”

  “Get off of me!” yelled a man from somewhere on the other side of the constable’s office door. “It’d be ‘interference’ if you bastards knew what you were doing, but you’re a bunch of blundering incompetents, every last man among you.”

  Chief Bryce pulled a face. “That’s the husband, Fred Cunningham. He’s in here every day, sometimes twice a day, checking up on us, seeing if we’ve got any new leads, telling us how to do our jobs... The rest of the time, he’s out there snooping around and making a pest of himself. Hey, I sympathize with him. He’s a grieving husband, he wants justice for his wife. But I wish he’d just trust us to—”

  A knock came at the door, which squeaked open to reveal a ginger-haired young constable holding out a handbill. “Sorry to interrupt you, Chief, but he’s at it again. Klingman found him passing these out in Davey Quinn’s neighborhood.”

  Bryce took the handbill, grimacing as he read it. “This is even worse than the last one. Next, he’ll be asking for the guy’s head on a spike.”

  Nell looked through the open doorway to see a fortyish man with wild, red-rimmed eyes trying to muscle his way between two big men blocking Chief Bryce’s door. “That includes you, Bryce!” he screamed, stabbing a finger in the chief’s direction. “All you do is tack up posters and sit around waiting for tips that never come, and you get mad when I go out and actually look for the son of a bitch. What do you think, if you wait long enough, he’s just going to just walk in here and give himself up?”

  “Tell him I’ll be out there to listen to his current rant just as soon as I’m finished up here,” Bryce instructed the young constable, who backed up and closed the door.

  “May I?” asked Nell as she reached for the handbill.

  With a why not look, Bryce handed over the bill. Nell held it so that Cyril could read it, too.

  $3,000 REWARD!!!

  For the capture of DAVID QUINN, wanted for

  M U R D E R !

  TURN HIM IN DEAD

  Or Alive

  The sum of THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS is offered by Mr. Frederick Cunningham of Falmouth Heights and Boston, Mass., upon presentation of the BODY or person of DAVID QUINN. As DAVID QUINN is known to be a first-rate marksman who is furthermore possessed of an excitable temperament, any attempt to capture him alive should be undertaken only by armed lawmen. Others are encouraged to employ whatever means necessary to subdue DAVID QUINN before he can vent his murderous rage.

  An additional award of TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS will be paid upon receipt of the CORPSE of DAVID QUINN within three months from the date of this circular, provided it is delivered in recognizable condition.

  DESCRIPTION.

  DAVID QUINN is 29 years old; 5 feet 7 inches high; thinly built; hair dark and thin; complexion pale; eyes protruding somewhat; a moustache of dark color; teeth defective; speaks rather quickly from the nose, in a high tone of voice; has a brisk gait; manner jerky and erratic; wears a bowler hat.

  __________

  IF KILLED or captured, address all information, telegraphic or otherwise, to FREDERICK E. CUNNINGHAM at either of these addresses:

  175 Grand Avenue, Falmouth Heights, Mass.,

  64 Beacon Street, Boston, Mass.

  August 3rd, 1870

  Bryce said, “Obviously Cunningham wants the bas—Davey Quinn not just arrested, but stone-cold dead. I can’t say as I’d feel any different if it was my wife that took a bullet to the brain, but by circulating something like that in Davey Quinn’s neighborhood, he’s basically soliciting murder. A worse assortment of ruffians and plug-uglies you can’t imagine.”

  Unfortunately, Nell could imagine them all too well, having lived among that breed for two years. Animals like that would knife their own mothers in the back for a bottle of rum.

  Bryce said, “Cunningham accuses us of not putting enough effort into the case, but when he had the chance to help us—really help us, not just play vigilante—he refused. When he first came back from New York, I asked if he wouldn’t mind posting a reward for information leading to the identification and arrest of his wife’s killers, say a thousand bucks, but he turned me down. Said he didn’t have that kind of money, on account of his business had started foundering, said the bank was threatening to foreclose on both his beach house and his home in Boston.”

  “Then how can he offer three thousand dollars
for Quinn’s capture?” Cyril asked.

  “It’s five thousand if they kill him, which is really what he’s looking for,” Bryce said. “Even one of the dumb bashers this handbill is aimed at can read between the lines, but the way it’s worded, Cunningham can claim that’s not really what he means. The first batch of these bills showed up the very day after Murphy’s body was identified, ‘cause I’d made the mistake of telling Cunningham that we’d be looking for Quinn now. So two weeks after he turns me down for the thousand, he’s offering five times that much to whoever kills Quinn. When I asked him where the money came from, he said he sold that case of nautical instruments to Cornelius Vanderbilt. He said it was enough money to dig him out of his hole, and then some.”

  “I thought that collection had sentimental value,” Nell said.

  “To the wife, not to him. In fact, he told me he loathed the sight of it, cause it was the reason his wife got killed, said he couldn’t wait to get it out of the house.”

  * * *

  “I’d like to see my brother,” Nell told Mr. Packer after the mortician finally agreed, with a churlish lack of grace, to cancel the sale of Jamie’s body and prepare him for burial in a fine walnut coffin, wearing a proper suit of clothes.

  “Right this way,” said the officious little toad as he ushered her and Cyril downstairs to a cryptlike basement redolent of death and carbolic.

  “Nell, are you sure you want to do this?” asked Cyril as Mr. Packer opened a door into what he called the “Cold Room” and stood waiting for them to enter. “It’s bound to be a very unpleasant sight.”

  “I’ve seen dead bodies before, if you recall. You should also recall that I have a fairly strong stomach.”

  “This is your brother, Nell, and people who’ve died this way...” He closed his hands over her shoulders and said, “If you see him like this, this is how you’ll remember him. You won’t be able to help it.”

  Nell wanted to argue with him—this was her only chance, after all, to view her last remaining family member before his body was committed to the earth—but she had to grudgingly admit that he was right about remembering. If only she could forget the sight of her mother’s desiccated face frozen in a grimace of agony after the bout of Asiatic cholera that had wrung the life out of her within the space of a single day.

  “Let me go in first,” said Cyril. “And then if it’s... not too bad...”

  Nell nodded at the floor.

  She sat on a little hard-backed chair at the bottom of the stairs listening to the hiss of the gas jets until he emerged from the room about five minutes later. Softly he said, “Jamie wouldn’t want you to see him like that.”

  Neither of them spoke as he escorted her out to the sunlit street and handed her up into his physician’s coupé. He settled next to her and unwrapped the reins from the brake handle, but then he just sat there, gazing down the road in a preoccupied way.

  “Cyril?”

  “I lost Charlotte,” he said without looking at her.

  Nell stared at him as it sank in. “She...?”

  “About a year and a half ago. It was cancer, but it was quick, thank God. They had to keep her in the psychiatric wing because... well, she’d become so delusional that they couldn’t handle her on a regular floor. But they kept her comfortable.”

  “Cyril.” Touching his arm, Nell said, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.” She wondered why he hadn’t told her this yesterday, but it was a question she kept to herself.

  He flicked the reins; the buggy rattled over the brick road. “If it’s any comfort to you, Nell, I think I can say with some measure of confidence that your brother succumbed to smoke inhalation rather than to the fire itself.”

  A bit thrown by the abrupt conversational shift, but heartened by this news, Nell said, “How did you conclude that?”

  “You may find the details a bit—”

  “Would you please stop trying to protect me and just tell me?” In a milder tone of voice, she added another, “Please.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “The flesh is charred, more so on the trunk and limbs than the head, I assume because his clothing caught fire. But as Chief Bryce mentioned, the entire dorsal aspect is relatively unscathed—skin, hair, clothing... There are even some bits of a wool blanket that must have been tucked around him. It’s clear that he was lying flat on his back, unmoving, when the flames reached him, and that could only have been the case if he’d been dead or unconscious.”

  She said, “Thank you, Cyril. It does comfort me to know that.”

  “There’s a Y incision on the torso, and several others from the embalming, but the head was untouched. Mustn’t disturb such valuable remains, eh?”

  * * *

  “I haven’t seen you in church this summer,” said genial Old Father Donnelly as he gestured Nell into an armchair in his book-lined office; Cyril, not wanting to intrude, was giving himself a tour of the modest little stone church.

  “Um...”

  Lowering his considerable bulk into the chair opposite Nell’s, he said, in his timeworn brogue, “Don’t tell me those Boston Brahmins have gone and turned my pious little Nell Sweeney into a Protestant. Port?” He asked, lifting a decanter from the table next to him.

  Relieved that he didn’t seem to expect a response to the “Protestant” comment, she declined the port and said, “Father, did you happen to see yesterday’s extra to the Barnstable Patriot?”

  The priest shook his head mournfully as he poured his glass of port. “If you’re asking whether I heard about Jamie, the answer is yes. I can’t tell you how it grieved me. I’m that sorry. A terrible thing. Terrible. Terrible.”

  “I’m surprised you even remember Jamie,” Nell said. “He hasn’t attended Mass here since he was a child.” As an adolescent, he’d always balked at going to church, even at Christmas and Easter.

  “Oh, sure, he used to show up every once in a while when he wasn’t behind bars, ‘specially the past few years. Late Mass, usually. I suppose that would be why you never ran into him during your summers here. You were always partial to the early Mass.”

  The realization that she and Jamie had come so close to crossing paths was deeply saddening to Nell. “I’ve come here to arrange for his funeral Mass, Father, and for him to be buried in the churchyard alongside Ma and Tess and the rest of them.”

  Father Donnelly lowered his glass to the table slowly, frowning in a troubled way. He started to say something, then looked away, murmuring, “Oh, dear, dear, dear.”

  “What’s wrong?” Nell asked. “Is it because he was a criminal? I know he lived a life of sin, but given how he grew up, is it any wonder?”

  “Aye, but you didn’t turn to sin,” the priest said.

  Nell gave him a look that said, Oh, didn’t I? Father Donnelly had been her confessor when she was regarded in lowlife circles as the most deft pickpocket on the Cape.

  He chuckled, ducking his head as if to concede her point. No matter how grim the circumstances, Father Donnelly never lost his good humor; it was one of the reasons his parishioners found him so engaging and easy to open up to.

  Nell said, “You’re always talking about God’s mercy, Father, about how he loves us all, even the sinners. If that’s so, then Jamie is as deserving of a church funeral as any of us.”

  Taking a sip of port, the priest said, “Between you and Claire Gilmartin, I’ve been subjected to quite the theological harangue these past couple of days.”

  “Claire Gilmartin? The girl from the cranberry farm? She’s one of your parishioners?”

  “Sure, and she lives just down the road on Mill Pond. She’s here every Sunday with her mother, Hannah, and her boarders. Mrs. Gilmartin insists they attend Mass, or they can’t live at her house. A harder worker you never saw. With all she’s got on her hands, managing the farm and the boardinghouse, she still finds time to come here and weed my flower garden, or bring me some eggs from her hens, or fruit from her trees, or a cake she baked, that kind
of thing. I know you’d recognize her and Claire if you saw them. Claire, she’s a sweet girl, too sweet for her own good, I sometimes think. But you should have heard her light into me about burying your brother in the churchyard.”

  “Does the Church actually forbid certain people from being buried in consecrated ground, or is it more a matter of... tradition?”

  “Oh, no, canon law expressly denies Christian burial to heretics, excommunicants, the unbaptized, those who’ve died in a dual or who’ve taken a life, including their own, those who hold the sacraments in contempt... Actually, all notorious sinners who die without repentance are excluded.”

  “How do you know for sure Jamie wasn’t repentant?”

  “Well...”

  “I know priests sometimes bend the rules, Father. I know you have.”

  “God save me from you headstrong Irish lasses,” he chuckled.

  “Bury him in the churchyard, Father,” Nell implored, her hands clasped as if in prayer. “Bury him with his mother and his brothers and sisters. If God really is as merciful as you’ve always told me, it would be the right thing to do, the only thing to do.”

  Father Donnelly studied her for a long moment, and then he drained his glass of port. “So, have you turned Protestant on me, or not?”

  Her hesitation must have been telling, because he poured himself another port and tossed that one back as well. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said, but there was a glint of amusement in his eye when he said, “Who would have ever thought I’d be knuckling under to a Protestant?”

  Chapter 4

  “You’re not having dessert, Nell?” Viola asked Friday evening as her dinner to celebrate Harry and Cecilia’s return from their honeymoon was drawing to a close. “You’ve always loved Mrs. Waters’ coconut cake.”