A Buried Past

by Alexandria Clarke

  “Tough girl, eh?” he asked. “Think that leather jacket makes you look hard?” The stupid grin returned to his face. “Wanna know what makes me hard?”

  He sank to his knees, resting his full weight on my torso and trapping my arms beneath his legs. I hollered as loudly as possible, but he planted his sweaty palm over my mouth.

  “None of that,” he said. “I like quiet girls.”

  I bit his hand, but he was so drunk that he hardly noticed. Pressing harder against my face, he used his other hand to undo his belt buckle. Panic spread through my veins as I tried to wriggle free and got nowhere. He pulled down his zipper.

  Evelyn, sans shoulder sling, stepped out of the shadows. If I hadn’t known her, the look of complete rage and abhorrence on her face would have scared the living shite out of me. Without making a sound, she seized the man around the neck and yanked him off me.

  In Evelyn’s grasp, he couldn’t get his feet underneath him. She dragged him like a ragdoll, his knees scraping the ground, and dumped him in the wet gutter a good twenty feet away. Then she turned his face up so that he could see her. He stared at her, looking utterly terrified.

  “That’s my friend,” she hissed. “I could kill you.”

  For a heated moment, I thought she might. Her fists moved at lightning speed. In one second, she had broken his nose. In another, she’d rendered him unconscious. He lay in the street, blood dripping from his nose and into his slack-jawed mouth. Evelyn had her back to me, shoulders by her ears, fists at her sides.

  “Ev?” I whispered.

  Part of me was scared to see her face, but when she rotated toward me, the anger receded from her expression, and anguished worry replaced it. She scooped me up and lifted me into a hug so tight that my feet hovered above the ground.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, holding me at arm’s length to examine me. “Did he hurt you?”

  “N-no. You came just in time.”

  All the adrenaline left my body at once. I shook violently, unable to stop my teeth from chattering. Evelyn shrugged off her sherpa-lined coat, pulled it around me, and rubbed my shoulders. Without letting go of me, she took out her phone and dialed the police.

  “Hi, my friend was just attacked near Henriques Street.” She rolled her eyes. “No, not by the Ripper. Well—” She glanced at the unconscious man in the gutter. “I suppose he could be the Ripper, but I suspect he’s just drunk and stupid. Come arrest him, yeah?”

  Not long after, the police questioned Evelyn and me about the nature of the attack. They kept us for far longer than I would have liked, and if it weren’t for Evelyn’s warm coat, I might have fainted from the cold and exhaustion.

  As Evelyn spoke to the police, explaining her role in his broken nose, she cradled her injured shoulder in her good hand. With the smallest of movement—a shift in her step, even—she winced. I replayed the attack over in my head; she’d used both arms to pull the drunk man off me and both fists to persuade him into unconsciousness.

  Officer Davies, a plump man with golden curls that made him look more like a cherub than a policeman, approached me for the third time. He had already taken my statement twice.

  “What?” I asked sharply.

  “Sorry to badger you, miss,” he said. “But we have to make sure we’ve got all the stories straight. You said you came from the Lazy Licker, yeah? What were you doing there all alone?”

  “There was a new DJ there,” I answered, yet again. “This guy hit on me at the bar and got offended when I rejected him. When I left, he followed me into the street. I tripped, and he got on top of me.”

  “Then your friend saw you and came to help?”

  “Yes.”

  Officer Davies uncapped a pen and wrote, at the slowest possible pace, my statement on his notepad. “He didn’t pull a knife on you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any reason to suspect he might be responsible for other crimes?”

  “I can’t imagine this is the first time he’s gotten too drunk and attempted to force a woman to sleep with him,” I retorted. “If you’re referring to the recent murders, then no. He’s a drunk asshole but most likely not a killer.”

  “We’ll be taking him into custody anyway,” Davies said. “Can’t be too sure about these things, you know? Sometimes, it takes a professional eye.”

  “Sometimes, it takes the police to be good at their jobs,” I replied shortly. “Don’t you already have a suspect in custody? Henry Alcott?”

  Davies shifted uncomfortably. “He was released.”

  “On what account?”

  “He had an alibi,” he answered. “Seven different people confirmed he was at a study session in Oxford at the time of the attack.”

  “In other words, you need another scapegoat.”

  Evelyn called me over, and I sidestepped the stumped Officer Davies to join her. I caught sight of the drunk man—who was now awake—in the back seat of the police car. I strongly suspected Evelyn had given him a concussion. His face was pressed to the window, and his dried blood smeared across the glass, but he seemed not to care.

  “We’re good to go,” Evelyn told me. “They have everything they need.”

  “Are you going to get in trouble for punching him?”

  She shook her head. “It was self-defense. The police agree he had it coming.”

  “Need a ride, ladies?” Davies asked.

  “We’re just around the corner,” Evelyn answered, wrapping her good arm around me. “Cheers, though.”

  We set off into the night. Evelyn’s casual manner faded as we left the police behind. Her posture dropped, and she started shivering. I unwound her coat from my shoulders and put it around her instead.

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

  Evelyn looked confused. “For what?”

  “Going to the party when you told me not to.”

  She smirked. “Did you think you had me fooled? I set an alarm for midnight because I knew you’d sneak out. How do you think I found you so quickly?”

  “Oh. Well, thanks. Is your arm okay?”

  “Pulled it a bit. I’m sure it’s fine.”

  Near dawn, it became apparent that Evelyn’s shoulder was not fine. She shook me awake, her face paler than the moon.

  “I think something’s wrong,” she whispered. “I can’t feel my fingers.”

  I flicked on the light, pulled the blankets back, and reined in a gasp. Evelyn’s shoulder had swollen to twice its normal size. The skin was bright red.

  “I’ll get your clothes,” I said, rolling out of bed. “We’re going to the hospital.”

  They admitted Evelyn at once. The doctor who originally treated her shoulder wasn’t on duty that night, so they gave her a bunch of painkillers while we waited for him to get to the hospital. Sweat poured down Evelyn’s face. The patterned clinical gown made her look like a small child. For the first time since I’d known her, she appeared weak and exhausted.

  At last, the doctor rushed in, cleaning his glasses on his white coat. “Evelyn, we meet again.” Gently taking Evelyn’s shoulder between his hands, he glanced toward me. “Who’s this?”

  “Jacqueline Frye,” I answered. “I’m her friend and caregiver.”

  “I’m Doctor Evans,” he said. To Evelyn, he asked, “Do you want her to stay for this?”

  “Yes,” Evelyn gasped, tears streaming. She reached out to me with her good hand, and I grasped it tightly. “I want her here.”

  “All right,” said Doctor Evans. “I’m afraid your shoulder’s pulled out of the socket again. I’ll have to maneuver it back in. Then we’ll do some scans and determine how to proceed. Sound good?”

  Evelyn nodded, not able to manage much else. With help from a student doctor, Doctor Evans cleaned the skin on Evelyn’s shoulder and injected some kind of medication into the joint with the biggest syringe I’d ever seen in my life.

  “All right, try to relax,” he told Evelyn, taking her elbow in a firm grip. “Miss Frye
, you might want to brace yourself.”

  “For what?”

  He ignored me. “Big breath in, Evelyn.”

  She pulled in a deep breath.

  “And out.”

  She complied.

  “In again. Out—”

  He externally rotated her arm, and as the joint popped back into place, Evelyn released a pained grunt. Doctor Evans felt around her shoulder, making sure it had returned to its regular spot.

  “There we go,” he said. “Stay still. We don’t want it to pop out again. Mary?”

  His assisting student popped her head in. “Yes, sir?”

  “Let’s get some new images of Evelyn’s shoulder,” he ordered. He patted Evelyn’s bed. “I’ll see you in a bit to talk about the results.”

  Doctor Evans left, and Mary prepared Evelyn’s bed to roll her to the imaging center. Evelyn grasped my hand.

  “This happened last night when you punched that guy, didn’t it?” I said, holding tightly to her arm. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was kind of hoping it hadn’t actually popped out,” she replied in a strained voice. She was still in a lot of pain. “Clearly, I was wrong.”

  Mary wheeled the bed a few inches toward the door. I walked alongside the bed, Evelyn’s hand in mine.

  “Sorry, miss,” said Mary. “You’ll have to wait here.”

  So I watched her take my best friend away from me, feeling useless and completely at fault.

  An hour later, Evelyn was returned to her room. When Doctor Evans came in to review the new scans with us, he wore a grim look.

  “The news isn’t good, I’m afraid,” he said, popping the scans into the backlit frame. The image of Evelyn’s ruined shoulder appeared. Evans pointed to a piece of tissue. “See here and here? You’ve torn the ligaments. It’s completely undone what we did in the last surgery. I would have to say it’s even made things worse. How’s the feeling in your fingers?”

  Evelyn struggled to move them. “Still nothing.”

  Evans pressed his lips together. “That’s what I was afraid of. Nerve damage. I’d like to get you in the operating room as soon as possible. If we don’t fix it now, you might never regain full use of the arm.”

  In this instant, Evelyn wore each of her expressions plainly. Her pain was evident in the wobbling of her chin, her fear presented itself in the whites of her eyes, and her anger—this should never have happened—was etched into the lines of her forehead. My bottom lip trembled, but I stopped myself from crying. She needed me to be strong.

  “Jack,” she whispered, her voice cracking.

  I pressed my forehead against hers. “You can do this. You’ve done it before. I’ll be here for you afterward. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  My words were enough to convince her. She wiped her eyes and lifted her chin. Just like that, all her uncertainty disappeared, or at least she hid it under a veil of stoicism.

  “Let’s do it,” she told Evans.

  I had never waited for someone in surgery before, but I had discovered it was the worst possible kind of waiting one could ever experience. It was worse than when you were desperate to pee on a long road trip with no rest stops in sight. Worse than waiting for a splinter embedded in your skin to break through the surface so you could finally pluck it out.

  Every so often, a nurse peeked into Evelyn’s room to give me an update, but it was never enough to soothe my nerves. “They’re still working,” was the usual news. “Everything’s all right so far.”

  So far. I could argue those were the two worst words in the English language, though at this moment it seemed like everything was worse than it usually was. The soda from the vending machines was flat, the coffee too bitter, and the smell of disinfectants so intense that my burning nostrils begged for relief.

  After two hours of torture, I decided I could no longer sit in Evelyn’s room and wait for her to come out of surgery. I had to do something. I had to find a purpose or reason for me to be in this hospital. I set aside Evelyn’s coat, which I’d been holding ever since they’d wheeled her off to the operation room, and left the room.

  The hospital hallways didn’t provide much relief. The disinfectant smell followed me, and the nurses gave me funny looks as I wandered aimlessly from one ward to the next. When my mother died, I hadn’t gone to the hospital. There wasn’t much point. My dad was the one who had to identify her body. I didn’t envy him. Mortuaries were cold and smelled like death, as if visitors needed more of a reminder of why they were there.

  I stopped in my tracks, and a nurse ran over my heels with a tray of surgical tools. The mortuary. What were the chances Rosie Brigham’s body was here? The parking garage on Hanbury Street wasn’t far from the hospital. This was where they would have brought her to confirm her state.

  I checked the closest directory. I’d wandered floors away from Evelyn’s room. As it turned out, the mortuary was down a flight of stairs and to the left. Not out of my way at all.

  The corridor outside the mortuary was empty. One of the lights flickered on and off, buzzing like a dying fly. I crept along the wall, my shoes squelching against the linoleum floor. The morgue door was mere feet away. I peeked through the window—no one inside—then pushed open the door.

  A body, covered in a sheet, lay on a metal table. Bile burned the back of my throat as I grasped the edge of the sheet and braced myself. I pulled the sheet away from the body’s face.

  It wasn’t Rosie Brigham. It was a teenaged boy who was far too young to be lying on that table. Curious, I lifted the blanket and saw the stab wounds in his torso. Knife fight. Not uncommon on the streets of London, especially if you fell in with the wrong crowd.

  Lockers for body storage lined the far wall. I examined the names taped to the front, searching for Rosie Brigham. Her name wasn’t there, but one locker wasn’t labeled. I grasped the handle, held my breath, and pulled the locker open.

  It was empty. Half-relieved and half-annoyed, I slid the locker back into place. Had Rosie already been buried? Surely, the police would have wanted to study her body more.

  I turned toward the computer. The details of Rosie’s time in the hospital would be stored somewhere in those files. If only I could access them…

  I shook the mouse, waking up the computer. Password. Of course. Above the desk hung a corkboard, pinned with all sorts of reminders, photographs, and scribbled notes. I sifted through it all, looking for something that resembled a password. Buried beneath a bunch of sticky notes was a shred of paper with a random combination of letters and numbers. I started typing it into the computer.

  “Hey!”

  The morgue door ricocheted open. One of the attendants had returned from his lunch break. His hand hovered over the phone by the door, ready to page someone if I turned out to be a threat. The other hand clutched half of a ham sandwich.

  “You’re not supposed to be in here,” he said.

  I backed away from the computer and accidentally knocked into the metal table. The boy’s body rocked. “So sorry. I got lost.”

  “The sign on the door says ‘morgue,’” the attendant replied acidly. “How lost could you be?”

  I tried a different tactic and let tears form in my eyes. “The anniversary of my mother’s death was a few days ago. I guess I wanted to see where she spent her last few hours on earth.”

  From the look on the attendant’s face, my second excuse wasn’t much better than the first. I sidled past him and into the corridor.

  “Sorry,” I said again. “Enjoy your sandwich.”

  “Uh-huh. This whole floor is off-limits to the public. Get back upstairs.”

  “Will do. Off I go.”

  With the attendant’s eyes boring holes into my back, I had no choice but to head right for the stairs. Sighing, I climbed all the way up to the floor of Evelyn’s room. Maybe the nurse had another update for me, one with actual information.

  As I was about to leave the stairway, I caught sight of something unusual o
n Evelyn’s floor. A familiar skinny figure with purple hair paced back and forth in the hallway. What was Matthew Thompson doing in the hospital?

  I lingered in the stairway to watch. He seemed to be waiting for something too. He wrung his hands, his gaze flickering up and down the hall. The nurses’ station was too far away for them to notice his odd behavior, but I had a front row seat.

  Suddenly, he darted behind a large locked cart of medications and ducked down. A nearby door—one with a numbered pad to unlock it—swung open, and a nurse emerged from the room, holding a file. Matthew waited for her to walk past, then he dashed across the hall and slipped inside the room right before the door closed again.

  I exited the stairway and took up Matthew’s previous post behind the medication cart. Five minutes later, he came out, cracking the door an inch to make sure the coast was clear. The front of his sweater was bulky and bunched up as if he’d hidden something beneath it. He didn’t spot me and scurried toward the stairway.

  “Not so fast.” I popped out from behind the medication cart and grabbed Matthew by his sweater. A file fell out of his shirt and hit the floor, strewing papers everywhere.

  He bent down to collect everything and shoved it all together with reckless abandon. “What’s your problem, lady?”

  “Remember me? From Saint Francis?”

  He looked up from the floor. “You’re that psycho who almost hit me.”

  “I did not hit you.”

  “I said almost.” He rose, hugging the messy file to his chest. “What do you want from me?”

  I pointed to the name on the file he’d stolen. “I want to know what you had to do with Rosie Brigham. Why was your prefect pin near her body in Whitechapel when you were supposed to be in school in Lambeth?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “You can tell me or the police,” I bargained. “One quick shout, and I can get one of those nurses down there to call security. All I have to do is say you broke into a locked room and stole a patient’s file. That’s a serious crime.”

  I caught him, and he knew it. Tears filled his eyes. His bottom lip wobbled. “If I tell you, you can’t tell anyone else.”