by Paul Boor
“There’s another body for us, boss,” Adam said. “But you ain’t gonna like it.”
“Where is it?”
“In Boonville. He’s at the undertaker’s.”
“Well then, get it into the icehouse.”
“I’m not sure that’s what you’ll want.”
Nicolas pushed away from the kitchen table and began to pace. “Damn that Thomas Chubb!” he grumbled. “He’s been off in Buffalo how long? A month? And now when we need him to do some embalming, where is he?”
“He’s in Boonville, boss. You see . . . the stiff is Thomas Chubb himself.”
Nicolas stopped in midstride. “Thomas? Dead?”
“And somebody’s already embalmed him.”
“Damn that Thomas Chubb.”
The buckboard had collected a good six inches of wet snow in its bed by the time Nicolas and Adam made Boonville. The funeral parlour Adam had been directed to was new in town, the second to open. The mortician who came to the door was a young man with a badly acne-scarred face. He seemed bewildered, wasn’t sure why the body had been delivered to him or exactly who sent it. It had simply arrived on the train from Buffalo.
“The body came embalmed,” he said. “Nice job, too. You know this guy? A sad case, this one. Lucky thing there was paperwork attached to him.”
The unlovely young mortician opened a large envelope that was soiled by dark brown fluids. He reached in and produced a coroner’s report. Nicolas held it at arm’s length for all to read. The document described in gruesome detail the official viewing of the body: “An obese male of the Caucasian race, fully dressed except for belt . . . blood under the fingernails . . . minor signs of trauma . . . a wide, darkly crusted ligature mark is consistent with the accompanying ligature, the decedent’s belt . . .” The report was signed and bore an official seal of Erie County.
“See, right there’s the sad part”—the youth pointed to the bottom line—“‘Final diagnosis, death by hanging. Manner of death, suicide.’”
Next, the young man handed Nicolas a page clipped from the Buffalo Daily Courier. “This came with the body, too,” he said. It was a front page; near the bottom a headline read, UNDERTAKER FOUND HANGING. The article was brief:
A long-established undertaker hailing from a small community in Northern New York was found yesterday morning hanging from an inner door of his rooms at the Hotel Fillmore. The maid made the discovery. The ligature was the victim’s own rather copious leather belt, which had been secured to the door’s lintel with nails. Investigation by the County Coroner is pending, but all available information indicates the case to be an obvious, albeit somewhat strange, incidence of suicide.
“There’s this note, too,” the young undertaker said, handing a small envelope to Nicolas. The note was addressed in a delicate, feminine script to “the local ice trader Van Horne.”
Nicolas’s hand trembled as he opened the envelope. The content was also in a woman’s handwriting, and well composed.
You forgot what I told you, sir, or perhaps you misunderstood. No matter, for it will come to the same end. As you no doubt surmise from this unusual gift, I no longer am in need of the services of your accomplice, nor of you for that matter. You fellows from up north are like fleas on my back, but sometimes the little fleas go too far.
My men will settle with you next, ice man. I will send real Russians to do the job. Trust me on this.
The signature was a scrawl. “Look how it’s signed,” Adam remarked, leaning in for a closer look. “It’s not regular letters.”
“That’s Russian,” Nicolas replied.
“Since when you know Russian?”
“His name is Zhivakov. I understand it perfectly. Must be he had one of his lady friends write the note.”
Snow fell thick and wet on the Forestport Road, nothing that would stick for long, but enough to soak through their woolens and chill them to their core.
“Damnedest thing,” Adam said with a nod to the load behind them in the buckboard. “He comes embalmed, complete with a coroner’s report. Good old Thomas. He’d be happy, huh? Details to the end.”
Nicolas wasn’t listening. “Stop ahead, right there,” he said, pointing.
Adam pulled the buckboard off the road at a flat place. Nicolas jumped down and walked around to the back. “Help me here,” he said. Together they unwrapped the canvas encasing the body. Nicolas tilted Chubb’s head back to expose the neck.
“Must be where the belt was.”
“Yes, but look closer. See the thin marks?” Nicolas pointed at a purple line cutting deep into the soft tissues. “It’s practically severed his windpipe.”
“What did that?”
“Something like piano wire.”
“So you mean—”
“The wire came first. He was dead, or near dead, when someone hanged him, nailed him up by his belt.”
Adam shook his head. “Sure fooled me. Fooled the coroner, too.”
They rewrapped the body, mounted the wagon, and continued in silence with their gruesome load. Nicolas had Adam turn onto the cemetery road and pull around to the Chubb Funeral Parlour’s mausoleum.
“What’re we going to do with him now?” Adam asked as Nicolas unlocked the door to the small stone building. “He’s got no family in town.”
“He had cousins out west, Missouri, I think, but they’ll never come out for a funeral. Not for old Chubb.”
“No funeral for the undertaker, huh?”
Nicolas smiled. “Nope,” he said as they wrestled Chubb’s bulk onto a cold shelf. “I suppose we might as well put him in the icehouse.”
“Seems fitting,” Adam agreed. “A small service in the village, just don’t show the body.”
“We’ll set a nice marker in the cemetery for when the family from Missouri comes.”
“Won’t be many mourners at his funeral anyway, only those he taught piano and previous lady friends. Won’t be many of them.”
“Haul him to the lake after dark, would you, Adam?”
“He’ll be in the ice before morning.” The trusted foreman got quiet, his brow wrinkled. He didn’t say a word until the buckboard had rattled down the hill from the cemetery, then he spoke out. “I gotta confess, boss—I’m gettin’ tired of this business of yours. I mean, death’s bad enough, but now it’s murder.”
“I’m afraid it’s too much about murder, Adam. And it looks like I’m next.”
68
The Time of Ice
Winter settled in hard during the first week of December. The first ice harvest was only a week or two away. Nicolas had taken a room in Boonville at the Continental Hotel after a report from the Forestport station that strange men disembarking the Buffalo train had been “asking after an ice merchant who lives in Forestport.” But three nights holed up in a room at the Continental grew tiresome, so Nicolas decided to spend a day or two at the lake, and check the ice.
He rode the Old Forge line to the Upper Spy cutoff, shouldered his small pack basket, and tramped in on the shoreline trail. The vast whiteness of Upper Spy Lake stirred his heart. The broad, smooth outlines of the drumlins around him were like the comforting, protective shoulders of old friends as the light fell off into early evening and it began to snow in earnest. The lake’s surface was a rough, opaque hide.
He walked out . . . two . . . four . . . six yards from shore. Alone, so early in winter and in the waning light of day, did he dare go further? The ice would be thin at the lake’s center. He strode out, testing it. Snowy crust crunched underfoot. The shoreline faded, then the ice groaned; he felt it sink underfoot, a sudden crack, and he veered back toward shore.
When Nicolas spied the icehouse planted solidly on the lakeshore, his breast swelled with pride. The cook’s shanty and bunkhouse looked abandoned and forlorn, barely visible behind the shifting curtain of falling snow. Nicolas unbolted the shanty’s door and quickly searched for food. All he found was a small tin box hidden under a bunk, half-filled with tea from
the Orient.
In the bunkhouse, Nicolas built a fire in the stove, boiled water in a cast-iron kettle, and brewed a pot of strong, black tea. He pounded the mustiness from a mattress and some blankets by beating them against the pine walls of the camp, then bolted the doors. He’d carried in a hunk of cheddar and a box of crackers, enough for a day or two. When he’d eaten and settled into a bunk, his sleep quickly filled with dreams of palm trees, purple orchids, and the salty smell of the sea.
He woke with a coarse shiver; he’d slept long and the fire needed feeding. Muted winter light seeped through the windows. He melted buckets of snow on the stovetop to bathe. He shook out his clothes, dressed by the stove, donned his greatcoat, and stepped out the door to survey a vast panorama of snow, powdery, clean, and as beautiful as the first day of creation.
A foot of snow had fallen overnight. The pines along the shore were flocculent with it. Nicolas wondered if such wild beauty, such stillness, could ever be penetrated by Zhivakov. Ordinarily, this landscape meant one thing to Nicolas—ice, pure and natural, of diamond hardness and clarity. Ice to be scored and cut, floated and stacked, stored, shipped, and sold. Now, Upper Spy meant solitude and safety.
Zhivakov knew he was an ice merchant, but how many lakes were there in the Adirondacks? The shoreline trail to the ice camp was unmarked; the camp was deserted. The Adirondack woods would be mystifying to a citified criminal, wouldn’t they? Especially in winter? Only if Zhivakov or his henchman found a guide—a traitor from Forestport who knew the trail—could he find his way to Upper Spy.
Nicolas walked onto the lake, kicking up a fine powder. The sky was opalescent and a light snow again fell. Licking the flakes from his bushy, unkempt mustache, Nicolas saw Upper Spy Lake differently this morning. He had shaped his life from the ice of Upper Spy; he knew its worth and the price it fetched in many ports. But was there more to ice than gold eagles and silver dollars? Nicolas had heard how ice had quelled the fevers of the sick as far away as India. How big must a man’s spirit be to turn his ice to that kind of good? What if all he saw before him on Upper Spy, all the profit of ice, were turned to the good of his fellow men—whether Chinaman, Northerner or Southerner, colored or white? Wouldn’t he, the ice merchant, be richer for it?
Nicolas trudged northeast across the frozen lake. Pulpit Rock stood like a tombstone on the shore, pale and obscured in the falling snow. He slowed when he was sure he stood over the spot where Ruth’s earthly remains were trapped under the ice. Tears came to his eyes at the thought of Ruth twisting on her anchor rope, her flesh preserved in the subzero currents until it turned to a soapy adipocere.
“Ruth”—a whisper in the steadily falling snow—“how I miss my dear Ruth.”
Nicolas wouldn’t call for another search. Come spring, there’d be no grappling hooks. He’d leave his beloved Ruth to the silence of the depths, to a watery grave, like a brave mariner.
The snow, falling faster, swirled in thick clots.
The ice would be ready in less than a week. In the village, machines were being oiled, ice plows sharpened, horses readied. Abigail and Adam had lined up the rehires from last year, men who wouldn’t succumb to drunkenness and gambling once they got a pretty penny in their pockets. There’d be new men to test, to try their hands with the horses, the machines, the ice. And boys, good boys and at least one lost boy who, he hoped, would turn out good.
A busy winter lay ahead. Christmas was around the corner, a motherless Christmastide for Abigail and Schuyler. Nicolas would chance it at the house, he’d watch for the men Zhivakov would send, he’d listen for alerts from the railway station, from the barrooms. He would take down his rifle and load it. Should they surprise him, he’d be ready. With luck, there’d be time to clean out the old Van Horne home, sweep the chimney, warm the parlour with a fresh-laid fire, and cut a tree for the hallway. Perhaps Abigail and Hilda would decorate the tree in the way of the Germans of Forestport, with small candles and sugar-glazed cookies.
In the hush of falling snow, Nicolas’s words were muted, softened. “There’s much to be done before I’m back on the Mississippi with another cargo.”
He turned and started toward the ice camp. An icy wind pummeled him from the north. The falling snow thickened, came at him sideways. If this kept up, it would be a blizzard. He couldn’t see the icehouse, managed only to shuffle in its direction. The wind burnt his face and seeped into his clothes, his wool hat, his mittens. Finally, the icehouse loomed out of the storm, a ghostly silhouette in a wall of white.
He decided to see how much ice remained—the ice that held the poor souls he’d collected. He fumbled with the padlock, put a shoulder to the door. Inside, he lit a kerosene torch and set off to the middle room that held the last of the ice. The huge space of the icehouse was hollow and still, while overhead the wind roared so that the building’s supporting timbers trembled.
Nicolas unlocked the center room and lifted the torch. Over two dozen bodies wrapped in canvas lay among the blocks, packages of cold flesh and bone preserved by the last Van Horne ice. Here was Nicolas’s other harvest; the final canvas-wrapped lump, and the largest, was Thomas Chubb.
In the Van Horne business of death, Thomas had been a skilled and industrious ally. Only since Galveston had Nicolas understood Thomas’s evil dealings with the slave trade, how Thomas had wedded himself to Buffalo for years. Nicolas admitted that his confronting Zhivakov was what caused Thomas’s murder. For that, Nicolas felt remorse, though he had followed the right course—a course that made him a fugitive.
“Damn you, Thomas, I’m next,” he said, retracing his steps. “I’m next, and damn you to hell for it.” He hesitated, then muttered, “You’re probably there already,” and locked the double padlocks.
Outside, Nicolas struggled to shut the icehouse door against the howling wind. It was a blizzard, and judging by the gale-force wind, years from now the old-timers would call it the worst blizzard of the decade. Nicolas guessed he’d be snowed in, and would be for days.
Back in the bunkhouse, Nicolas checked the wood supply. He stoked the fire and went one last time into the cook’s shanty to search for food. He didn’t find much. A small can of beans; a few scraps of moldy, dried venison the chipmunks hadn’t found. More black tea. Then, in the back of a cupboard he discovered a large tin of rice, a bonanza for a starving man, plenty for the days ahead.
That night the north wind moaned and the bunkhouse shook. Nicolas sat close to the stove and boiled a pot of rice. Plain and white as snow, it was the best rice he’d ever tasted.
IV
Return
69
The Ugly Mississippi
-PILOT’S LOG-
-15 March 1890-
River below Saint Louis near flood stage. Running under steam. Going rough and fast. Crew competent. No need to pump bilge. Cargo of New York ice shows little melt.
The Jilted Lady labored. Her thrashing side-wheels roiled the muddy river. A converted frigate, the Lady wouldn’t unfurl her sails until the open water of the gulf, but her Scotch boiler supplied plenty of power. The twists and turns of the Mississippi demanded plenty of power from her paddle wheels, together with the keen attention of a seasoned river pilot, a “lightning pilot,” as Captain Henry Rossbacher had called himself at the hiring. “I’m the fastest man on the river,” was Captain Rossbacher’s immodest comment to Nicolas. “We’re an agile combination, the Jilted Lady and me.”
Nicolas let go the rail and staggered to the rattan and bamboo lounge chair he’d bolted to the deck. Adam, tight-faced and off-color, leaned over the rail, his eyes fixed on the turbid river.
“Dang!” Adam exclaimed. “That’s some dirty water.”
“Stinks, too, doesn’t it?”
“My guts can’t take much more of this, boss.”
“Should smooth out tomorrow,” Nicolas said, easing into his deck chair. “Keep your eyes on the shoreline. It’ll take your mind off it.”
Nicolas had sensed Adam’s glumness
since they left the North Country. Their success in Saint Louis, where they’d unloaded their sister ship’s cargo of ice and delivered four specimens of secret cargo to the medical men, had little effect on Adam’s melancholy. Nicolas guessed it wasn’t the wicked roll of the ship eating at his foreman. It was the thought of his wife back home, Gertrude, and her advancing consumption.
“Come this spring,” Nicolas said, “I say you take Gert to Saranac. That high mountain air’s just the thing.”
“Easy to say, but—”
“And don’t fret the cost, man. I’ll cover it.”
Nicolas’s thoughts turned to his own home life and the sad, disrupted holidays he’d passed at the house on Maple Street. With Schuyler’s return from Saint Louis, Christmastide was a bittersweet mix of holiday cheer and family mourning. A tree stood in the hall, but mirrors throughout the house were draped in black. Then, early on Christmas Eve, word came from Stillman’s Inn that a certain Mr. Wilson, a hulking, brawny fellow, had checked in. Nicolas acted fast. Schuyler mounted a train bound for Saint Louis, Abigail scuttled down the hill to Hilda, and Nicolas was forced into the woods far from Forestport on a frosty Christmas morning.
Luckily, there’d been no January thaw. With Abigail at his side, Nicolas had quickly filled the icehouse with the winter’s second harvest. His daughter was a great comfort, though her keen interest in his efforts to expose the slave trade gave him trepidation. Nicolas succeeded in keeping the fact of the murdered boys from her, but she’d deduced the rest. Naturally, he forbade Abigail to go near the Buffalo criminals, so she’d taken it on herself to visit orphanages across western New York to enquire how children might go missing or be taken from an orphanage by persons of questionable repute.
