by P. B. Ryan
Nell stopped walking, her breath harsh in her ears as she watched Will hike up his trouser legs and hunker down, laying his hat next to him. She waited a moment, preparing herself for both the smell and what she was about to face, before covering the remaining distance.
The first thing she saw was more of that striking red hair—great, serpentine masses of it, a few tendrils quivering in the breeze. She stopped short when she caught sight of Bridie herself lying supine in the grass, her hands clenched at her sides, her face turned toward Nell but obscured by matted hair. She wore a green-and-pink striped silk basque, gaping open to reveal her bosom and the top few inches of her corset, with a rust-colored scarf around her neck. Her pink skirt was pushed up to her thighs, along with a single petticoat; she wore no crinoline. Like her hair, her clothing had a slightly stiff, damped-down quality from having been rained on.
Nell was surprised, at first, to find Bridie so plump, except for that snugly corseted waist; her arms looked like sausages within the tightly stretched sleeves of her basque. But then Nell noticed her legs—thick and shapeless, with greenish gray discoloration beneath shiny-taut skin—and she realized the body had merely become distended from a buildup of gasses.
A beetle scuttled out from beneath Bridie’s skirts, crawled down her thigh, and paused to consume one of many little whitish grains scattered over her legs—seeds from the surrounding grasses, Nell thought, until she noticed them squirming.
Something brackish rose in her throat. It was only when Will asked if she was all right that she realized she’d made a sound.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m...I’m fine.”
“You have seen corpses before.” He lifted Bridie’s right arm, bent it at the elbow, lowered it; her hand remained fisted.
“Good Lord, yes.” The earliest dead bodies she could recall had been those of the two sisters and three brothers she’d lost to various diseases during the first decade of her life; next had been her mother, of Asiatic cholera; and finally her last remaining sister, the baby—little Tess, with her winsome smile—of diptheria when it swept through the Barnstable County Poor House. Death had worn a different, bloodier face during the two years she’d been known as Cornelia Cutpurse. The knife fights, the savage beatings... And, then, of course, she’d spent four years as a nurse of sorts for Dr. Greaves, and all doctors, even doctors as capable as he, lost patients from time to time.
“I’ve been watching people die all my life,” she told Will. “But I’ve never seen a body in...quite this condition before.”
“I wish I could say the same thing.” He started gathering up Bridie’s hair to expose her face, his touch as careful as if she were alive. “During the war, the men who fell, on both sides, were often just left where they lay. I might pass the site of a battle that had ended hours, or days, or even weeks before, and find it strewn with corpses. If there was time, I would stop and take notes—how long they’d been dead, what kind of weather they’d been exposed to post-mortem, their internal temperature, how decomposed they were, whether there was rigor mortis or livor mortis, what kind of insect activity was present...”
“Why, for pity’s sake?”
“There are situations involving foul play, such as this one, I should think, where it can be helpful to know when death occurred—the better to identify and prosecute the killer. The legal applications of medicine had been a particular interest of my favorite medical professor at Edinburgh. When I found myself exposed to all those corpses whose time of death could be pinpointed within a few hours, I realized it was the perfect opportunity to do a little field work for him. My intent was to send him my notebook after the war, but of course the Rebs confiscated everything when they took me prisoner.”
He peeled away the last hanks of hair to reveal Bridie’s face—or what was left of it.
“Oh, God.” Nell squeezed her eyes shut, but the image was emblazoned in her mind: the swollen, discolored face, the yawning mouth and milky eyes, but most of all the maggots, lazily roiling masses of them in every orifice.
Will touched her hand. “Why don’t you go back to the house?” he suggested gently.
“No.” She forced herself to open her eyes, to look, even as her stomach heaved. “I’m all right.”
“Are you sure?” He gently straightened Bridie’s head so that she was staring sightlessly into the sky; the right side of her face, where the blood had pooled after death, bore bluish-purple stains except on the spot where her cheek had been pressed against the grass. A whitish froth exuded from her mouth and nose, in addition to the maggots.
“You aren’t going to faint on me,” he said.
“I don’t faint.”
“Nell, I’ve seen you faint.” He snapped a slender twig off a nearby plant.
“I don’t faint often. What are you doing?” she asked as he scooped up one of the maggots on the tip of the twig and stood to scrutinized it.
“The life cycle of the blowfly follows a predictable pattern,” he said as he took the tiny creature—a writhing grain of rice—onto the tip of a finger. “A body might be dead only minutes, seconds even, and they’ll be right there laying their eggs. It takes about a day for the eggs to hatch into larvae, which feed off the host body with these rather sinister looking little mouth parts. See?” He held the maggot toward Nell. She took a step back, nodding mechanically.
He said, “The larva molts a couple of times and gets larger as it feeds, but then, after about a week or two, depending on the temperature and humidity, the mouth parts disappear and it shrinks again. Finally it develops a sort of hard, dark shell, and before the month is out, it’s become a fly.”
“You learned all this from observing dead soldiers during the war?” she asked.
“And at Andersonville. It was the deuce trying to keep the blowflies from doing this—” he gestured toward Bridie’s grotesque face “—to those poor fellows in the hospital hut while they were still alive.”
Nell shuddered.
“Unfortunately,” Will said as he peered at the maggot, “the weather’s been so erratic the past few days—cold and rainy one day, hot and sunny the next. Hard to say how long it might have taken these little buggers to get to this stage. All I can say with any confidence is that it was more than, say, a day and a half, but less than a week.”
Warming to the subject, Nell asked, “What about those other indicators? Rigor mortis, decomposition...”
“There’s no cadaveric rigidity except in the hands, and that’s just spasm,” he said, flicking the maggot away. “Rigor has already run its course, which means this poor girl died at least thirty-six hours ago—but of course, we already knew that from the larvae. As for decomposition, that’s also affected by weather and the like. In this case, it doesn’t tell me much. I’ve no thermometer with which to take her internal temperature, but she’s cool to the touch...”
Will might have been delivering a lecture to medical students, so quietly authoritative did he sound. Nell found this reminder of his former calling as a physician somewhat fascinating, but a little sad as well. Here was a man whom General Grant had once called the finest battle surgeon in the Union Army. Now those deft, well-trained hands that had saved so many lives performed no function more complex than shuffling a pack of cards.
“Livor mortis is present,” Will continued, “as you can see on her face. If she were dead less than twelve hours or so, it would blanche when depressed, but it won’t.” He squatted down to press a finger against the purplish stain, which, indeed, was unaffected. “She’s definitely been dead a day and a half—probably longer, given the size of the larvae and the extent of decomposition, but again, there are so many variables where those are concerned.”
“How do you suppose she died?” Nell asked.
“There are no superficial indications—she really ought to be autopsied—but I think it’s safe to say she was murdered. Not by my brother, obviously.”
“Why obviously?”
“Have you
asked yourself where Virgil Hines has disappeared to? Mark my words, when we find him, we’ll find the man who did this to Bridie.”
“But he loved her.”
“Would that love have survived Duncan’s continued diatribes against her? He made quite a case for ‘getting rid of her,’ whatever that was supposed to mean, although I have my suspicions. What’s more, he called Virgil’s manhood into question if he didn’t do it himself, and believe me, there are few men who are immune to that particular tactic.”
Nell didn’t pursue the subject. Either the truth would surface, or it wouldn’t. There was nothing to be gained by entering into a protracted debate with Will. She studied Bridie’s corpse, looking for anything that might help to explain what had happened to her.
“Her hands and feet are filthy,” Nell said. Crouching down, she stripped off her gloves, took tentative hold of Bridie’s right hand, which felt a bit like India rubber, and pried her fingers open. The distended flesh was blackened as much by dirt as by post-mortem lividity, her palm scoured by irregular abrasions packed with grit and gravel. Some sort of vegetative matter—narrow leaves, or blades of grass—was tucked into the crease between her palm and fingers.
“Look at this,” Nell asked, running a fingertip along a neatly seared stripe of flesh on Bridie’s palm. She checked the other hand, which bore a similar mark.
Will said, “It looks as if she burned herself lifting that skillet without using the rag.”
“Her own fingernails did this,” said Nell, pointing to a series of nicks on the balls of the dead woman’s hands. The tips of her fingers were scraped, several of the nails broken. Nell checked her feet, which were as badly abraded as her hands. “She didn’t succumb easily. She struggled at the end.”
“Yes. But not here.” Will rubbed his thumb over Bridie’s grimy palm. “This is dried mud. And there are bits of leaves and plant stems and such here and in her hair that aren’t from this field.” Rising to his feet, he looked around. “There looks to be a stream in this little patch of woods here.”
The smell of death didn’t dissipate as they made their way through the trees; if anything, it got stronger. The reason became clear when they arrived at the bank of a shallow, rocky stream flowing through a lush carpet of ferns and moss. Lying facedown in the water, his body floating on the surface, was a male corpse that was almost as distended as that of Bridie Sullivan, but not quite—probably because it was cooler here, in the shade, than out in that field.
The dead man wore a wool flannel shirt that was red on the exposed back and pinkish underwater, some of the dye having bled into the stream, and checked trousers with worn leather suspenders; no vest or shoes. He had dark brown, overgrown hair.
Will stared at the body for a long moment without looking in Nell’s direction. “I’m going to turn him over.” He took off his hat, coat, boots, and lisle stockings, then rolled up his sleeves and trousers and waded into the stream. Beneath its foot or so of crystalline water, it looked almost as if it were paved in cobblestones and gravel, but for various water weeds and the occasional boulder.
The unwieldy corpse proved difficult to budge from Will’s position to one side of it. He tried to straddle it, one foot on each of a pair of relatively flat rocks, but he instantly lost his footing. Down he went, twisting to avoid landing on the body so that he hit the streambed on his right side, grunting with the impact.
“Will! Are you all right?” Nell asked as he sat up in the waist-high water, soaking wet.
“Yes, splendid,” he said in a dryly baleful tone. “I quite like being humiliated in front of beautiful women. Improves the character.”
“Oh, Will—your arm!” His sleeve was torn and muddied, and blood seeped through in several places, staining the snowy cambric a mottled crimson. “Here, let me help you.” She lifted her skirts and prepared to cross to him via a series of rocks that formed a sort of stepping-stone bridge in his direction.
“No, Nell, don’t. These rocks are all covered with moss. They’re slick as wet ice. I’m fine, really.” He rose onto his knees and, in that position, was able to heave the body over, with the head resting on a large, flat rock as if on a pillow.
The face was that of a young man with large, filmy eyes half-concealed by tendrils of hair. Even bloated and waterlogged as he was, and ruddy with livor mortis, Nell could tell that he’d been handsome before his demise.
“Would you mind moving the hair off his forehead?” Nell asked.
He glanced up at her quizzically.
“Virgil Hines has stars tattooed there.”
“Served aboard the Kearsage, eh?” He pushed the hair back, revealing an area of bluish-red discoloration.
“Is that bruising or lividity?” Nell asked.
“Only an autopsy would tell for sure at this point.” He leaned over to peer at the blemished skin.
“Are there stars? I’m too far away to see.”
She could tell even before he spoke, because of his grimly resigned expression, what his answer would be. “Yes.” He rose to his feet, dripping water and blood, unbuttoned his vest and wrung it out. “If you think this proves Harry did it—”
“It doesn’t prove that,” she said, “but it does narrow down the field of likely candidates.” To one, but why belabor the obvious? Harry was Will’s brother. This must be excruciating for him. “You should come here and let me look at that arm,” she said, but he’d already turned and started wading downstream.
“Looks as if Virgil wanted some fish to disguise the taste of those johnnycakes.” He pointed to something caught between two rocks. Nell had assumed it was a tree branch, but as she walked downstream, she saw that it was the bottom half of a fishing pole, split in the middle.
“What’s that?” Nell asked, pointing. “There’s something on that rock—behind you and upstream about a yard from where you are.”
Will leaned over to peer at the tiny object on the rock’s concave surface, looking like the last peppermint left in a candy dish. He picked it up and brought it over to Nell.
It was a little round button covered in pink silk, a few pink threads hanging from its frayed underside, as if it had been violently ripped from the garment to which it had been attached.
Stowing the button in her chatelaine, Nell said, “I’ll tell the Salem constabulary where we found this. We’ll need to drive back into town and let them know what happened. Here—let me see that arm,” she said as she pulled off her gloves. His sleeve was as red as Virgil’s.
“It’s fine,” Will said as he sat down to put his boots and stockings back on. “Just a couple of scrapes.”
“Scrapes don’t bleed like that.” Crouching down next to him, she reached for his sleeve.
He grabbed her wrist. “I said I’m fine.”
“I’ve seen the marks already, remember?”
“They’re uglier up close.”
“I promise not to swoon from revulsion.”
Looking exasperated even as he fought a smile, Will released her wrist and pushed the sleeve up. The needle marks were uglier up close, but she ignored them. There were two raw abrasions, but the real bleeder was a gash just below his elbow.
“That must have hurt.” She unfolded a handkerchief—one of the set of prettily monogrammed ones Viola had given her as part of her birthday present last month, along with the pearl-tipped hair picks and a fancy new easel.
“Don’t use that. You’ll ruin it.” Reaching into his pocket, he said, “Use one of mine.”
“I’ll use yours to clean it, but mine to bandage it,” she said as she gently wiped bits of grit and gravel from the wound. “Mine is oversized. Hold still.”
He watched her as she tied her handkerchief around his arm. “You’ve got a nice touch—gentle but not tentative.”
“Thank you.” She dipped his handkerchief in the stream to rinse off the dirt and tiny pepples. “Bridie had grit like this imbedded in her hands, and the leaves she was clutching look like the ones on these plants.
Then there’s that button. But if she was killed here, what was she doing in that field? Do you suppose she was mortally injured but tried to crawl back to the house?”
“If so, why was she lying flat on her back with her arms at her sides?”
Nell shook her head as she squeezed out the handkerchief. “I’ll be interested to see what theories the Salem Police come up with. For all that they call themselves a city, they’re pretty provincial. I wonder if they’ve ever investigated a murder before.”
On his feet now, Will said, “I don’t see any need to offer up more than the basic information, do you? Certainly we can tell them who these people are and what we know about them, but not...” He raked both hands through his hair. “I mean, I know you have certain opinions about the matter, certain preconceived—”
“I won’t point the finger at your brother, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”
His met her gaze, looked away. “Thank you.”
“But if they conduct anything more than the most cursory investigation, it’ll lead them right to Harry—you do realize that. Everyone who works at that mill knew what was going on between him and Bridie. They all saw his reaction when Virgil kissed her. And those who didn’t overhear them arguing about Bridie’s blackmail scheme have surely heard about it by now. No one who gathers all the facts could fail to suspect him.”
“I don’t suspect him.”
“You’re his brother,” she said gently.
“No, it’s not just that,” he said with a grimace of impatience. “You don’t understand. Harry...yes, he’s a blackguard, he’s selfish and spoiled and lecherous and weak-willed and all the rest of it, but there are some lines even he wouldn’t cross, no matter how much absinthe he’d poured down his throat. I know it in my heart. He may or may not be salvageable as a human being—I’m a bit doubtful of that myself now, knowing what he did to you—but that doesn’t mean he deserves to be unfairly convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. A double murder,” he amended, looking toward Virgil’s body floating on the placid stream, heavy-eyed and dappled with sunlight; he looked as if he were taking the waters at Saratoga Springs.
