“Where have you been?” Hay shouted, running up to us. “Lincoln’s been looking frantically for you. For hours.”
“Why ever?”
“It’s terrible. He’s devastated.” Hay gulped. “Margaret Owens is dead.”
CHAPTER 26
Hay led us to Henry Owens’s apothecary on the square. He and his sister lived on the second floor, above the store. The street in front of the apothecary was full of men and women conversing in low tones. We spotted the hulking form of Sheriff Hutchason and went up to him.
“Horrible business,” he said, nodding at us.
“What happened?” I asked. “Martha and I just returned from a ride.”
Hutchason motioned for us to follow him away from the mass of people toward the capitol construction site in the center of the square. “Her brother found her body in bed shortly after noon,” he began in a low rumble. Martha put her hand to her mouth. “It’s a mystery how it happened. Owens said she hadn’t been ill recently.”
“I saw her a couple of days ago,” I said, “with Lincoln at Hoffman’s Row. She looked glowing—never better, actually.”
Hutchason nodded somberly. “That’s just what Owens told me. Apparently when she woke this morning, she complained of a headache and he mixed a compound for her to take with a glass of brandy. A normal remedy, he says, a tonic he’s dispensed to her many times in the past. The poor fellow was beside himself. He’s sleeping now. Doctor Warren forced enough whiskey down his throat to knock out five men.”
Martha and I locked eyes and I could tell we had the same thought. Salem’s Ghost had warned Lincoln this very morning that judgment day was at hand. “Have you considered the possibility of foul play?” I asked the sheriff.
“Are you saying Owens killed his sister?”
Was I? I had no reason to suspect ill feeling between brother and sister. On the other hand, several circumstances fingered Owens as a potential suspect in the killing of Early. And here he was again in close proximity to an unexplained death.
To Hutchason, I said, “Surely it’s possible something in the compound he gave her proved fatal. How did it get there? The most likely explanation is that the apothecary himself put it in.”
“I suppose he might have added a deadly ingredient by mistake,” said Hutchason. “These are cloudy, mysterious compounds we’re talking about.”
“He’s been practicing his art for many years,” said Martha. “Would he really have added a fatal ingredient by accident?”
“I’d like to examine the bedroom where she died,” I said.
Hutchason looked uncomfortable. “The, er, corpse is still there. Higgins isn’t able to collect it until tomorrow. And as for Lincoln, have you seen him yet?”
“We came straight here when we heard the news from Hay.”
“I think you should find him, talk to him, before you do anything else. The last I saw him … He’s in a bad way.”
“Let’s go,” said Martha.
“I’d better go alone,” I said. “I’ll escort Martha back to your house first. But later, after I’ve talked to Lincoln, I want to examine the bedroom.”
Hutchason and Martha reluctantly agreed to this plan. After depositing Martha at the Hutchason house and ensuring she locked the door behind her, I began to search for Lincoln. I started with our lodgings and clambered up the back stairs from my storeroom, calling out his name. But our bed was empty, and Hurst, lounging in his, said he hadn’t seen Lincoln all day. Next I tried Hoffman’s Row. It was dark outside now, but no candle burned in the window of No. 4. Nonetheless, I mounted the stairs and, finding the office door unlocked, pushed it open.
“Lincoln?” I called out.
The room was silent and inky. The still air tasted stale. Nothing moved. I was about to head out, wondering where to search for Lincoln next, when my eye caught the faintest hint of movement from the far, dark corner of the room.
“Lincoln?” I shouted again.
There was still no answer, but as I took a few steps in that direction I realized it was him, or at least his form. He was sitting in the corner, his arms hugging his knobby knees to his chest. His buffalo robe was gathered around his shoulders and cinched in front. His jaw was clenched and the skin covering his cheekbones was drawn so tight it looked like a hole might be ripped in his skin at any moment. His eyes, open but lifeless, stared straight ahead.
He did not move or react in any way as I approached, and for an awful moment I thought he, too, might be dead. But then I perceived his chest rising and falling with shallow breaths.
I took a seat on the floor beside him. Still he did not acknowledge my presence.
“I’ve come from the apothecary,” I said quietly. “I talked to Hutchason. I … oh, Lincoln, I’m ever so sorry.”
Nothing.
“She was a good person, Lincoln. A kind person. She’s in heaven now.” I didn’t know if I believed this last part, but what else was there to say? What else was there to say to a man who’d lost his mother, brother, sister, first love, and now another woman he had thought could make him happy?
Nothing.
“I’m going to stay with you for a spell. I don’t think you should be alone, not at a time like this.”
I sat with my back against the wall, about five feet over from Lincoln. I breathed slowly and deeply, trying to convey to my friend, I suppose, the importance of continuing to breathe. I’d seen Lincoln laid low before; the nervous burdens of daily life sometimes weighed on him more heavily than they weighed on the normal man. But I’d never seen him in such an enervated state.
Some amount of time passed. In the darkened, motionless room, it was impossible to tell how much.
Eventually he spoke, in a low monotone. “What’s the purpose of it all, Joshua?”
I thought about this, a dozen different answers parading though my mind. Finally, I offered: “‘The great object of life is sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain.’”
He expelled his breath, something like a weak laugh. “Byron? You chose Byron? Better than Macbeth, I suppose.”
“Life’s a tale told by an idiot, as well,” I said. “Certainly it is today.”
He nodded in the darkness. “Where were you this afternoon?”
“Martha and I went for a ride.” I’d thought about how to answer this question while waiting beside him; I couldn’t imagine telling him we’d been to New Salem, not in these circumstances. “It was a fine day and we went further than we intended. Hay said you’d been looking for me. I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered.”
“Perhaps not. Still, I wish I’d been here.”
Lincoln shrugged.
I wanted to keep him talking, but I struggled with what to say next. I know you’ll miss her? There’ll be another one? Death comes when Death wants? It all seemed inadequate.
“It’s my fault,” he said suddenly.
“Yours? How can you think that?”
“On our last walk—that evening you were here—the question of our future arose and I … hesitated. I wasn’t sure. I think she took it as rejection.”
“You think she took her own life?” I hadn’t considered this possibility.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? What other explanation could there be?”
“I talked to Sheriff Hutchason. He’s planning a full investigation. Maybe it was the man who shot over our heads the other day. The man who left the threatening letter.” I know who you walk with.
“Then it’s certainly my fault,” he said in a low, agonized voice.
“It’s not your fault, Lincoln. Whatever happened, it’s not your fault.”
Lincoln was silent for several minutes. Then he mumbled, “It doesn’t matter. Nothing does,” and pulled himself into an even tighter ball. He lapsed back into silence. More time passed.
“Will you come back to our room with me now?” I said at last.
“No.”
“Will you come back later this ev
ening?”
He paused. “I suppose so. At some point.”
“Promise me you will,” I said earnestly. “Promise me, or I’ll start reciting everything Byron and Shakespeare ever said about life and death. And Wordsworth, too, for good measure.”
Lincoln gave a short cry, a mixture of anguish and laughter. “That’s quite a threat.”
“I know it is. So promise me.”
He paused again and sighed. “I promise.”
“Good. I’ll leave you, then. If there’s truly nothing I can do for you…”
“There’s not.”
I put my hand on his shoulder and rested it there. His shirt was clammy. After a while he nodded and I climbed to my feet. As I walked toward the door, I spied a small letter-opening knife lying on his table in the center of the room. Without breaking stride, I slid the knife into my pocket.
Outside on the dark streets I breathed deeply, glad for fresh air after several hours spent inside the close office. I strode across the green to the apothecary. The crowd outside had dispersed and now only Hutchason remained, standing guard beside the door.
“I was about to give up on you,” he said. “Did you find Lincoln?”
I nodded and gestured we should proceed inside.
“It’s pretty gruesome. You sure you want to see it?”
“I need to do something that might help figure out what happened. For Lincoln’s sake.”
Hutchason led me through the apothecary and up the stairs. I struck a candle and followed behind him. On the second floor was a small landing with two closed doors leading off. “Owens is asleep in there,” Hutchason whispered, pointing at one of the doors before heading toward the other. “Steel yourself.”
In truth, nothing could have prepared me for the horror waiting behind the other door. Miss Owens’s corpse lay atop her bedclothes. She was dressed all in white, with a long, linen nightgown, adorned with a few ruffles and a frilled neck, and a simple white nightcap covering her hair and tied around her neck.
But if the clothing on the corpse was commonplace, her person was anything but. Miss Owens’s body was arched horribly, such that only the back of her head and her two heels touched the bed; the rest of the body formed a long, frozen arc. Her arms were rigid at her side. Her face was bright red. The muscles of her face were contorted, her lips were fixed in what seemed like a wild grin, and her eyes bulged out of their sockets.
“Dear God!” I shouted.
Hutchason nodded somberly. “The body’s been frozen in this pose from the moment I first saw her. Her face was even redder originally.”
“What could have caused it? Did Owens have any ideas?”
“I couldn’t get two words of sense out of him after he showed me the body. Not that you can blame him.”
“Have you ever seen a corpse like this?”
Hutchason shook his head. “Owens told me he gave her a glass of brandy and the normal draught he’s always dispensed to her for her bouts of illness.”
“She must have ingested some foreign substance, some poison, to cause these symptoms. That’s not a natural way to die. Have you examined the drinking glass?”
Both of us looked at the small wooden table beside Miss Owens’s bed. It was bare.
“I haven’t seen it,” said the sheriff. “I assumed Owens took it back after she drank it down.”
I walked up to the bed and, without touching the dead body, felt around in the bedclothes. Nothing. Then I lowered my candle and looked on either side of the bed. Finally, on my knees, and taking care that the candle didn’t set the bed on fire, I peered beneath the bedframe. I saw the glint of a small wine glass that had rolled partway under and reached for it.
I scrambled to my feet and handed the glass to Hutchason, who examined it with interest. There was a tiny residue of brown liquid clinging to the bottom of the glass. Hutchason sniffed it carefully, considered, then put his little finger inside the glass and brought it to his tongue. He winced and handed the glass to me. I repeated the examination and put a tiny drop of the liquid on my tongue.
“Bitter!” I exclaimed, and Hutchason nodded.
“The lady was poisoned,” announced Hutchason. “Whether accidentally or on purpose—that’s the unanswered question.”
“And by whom,” I added, thinking of Lincoln’s suggestion she had done the deed herself. But who in their right mind would choose such a horrible way to die? “Owens, surely, is the most likely suspect,” I continued. “He’s admitted he gave her the draught. But why would he kill his own sister—and in such a horrendous way?”
Hutchason just shook his head.
When I returned to our lodgings, Hurst and Herndon were already snoring in their bed. Our bed was empty. I lay down, my body tense, waiting for Lincoln’s return. I tried without success to drift off.
So I lay wide awake and listened to the summer insects outside our open window cry and sing through the night. Well after midnight, I finally heard heavy, familiar footsteps ascending the back stairs. When, at last, Lincoln lowered his body into bed next to me, I exhaled a long, low breath.
CHAPTER 27
The following days were at once dreamlike and altogether too real.
Lincoln was plunged into a deep melancholy from which there seemed no hope of rescue. He spent his days trudging silently up and down the street, his head down, his back bent nearly in half, his hands fidgeting pensively behind his back. He wore all black, from his stovepipe hat to his scuffed leather shoes. He was a study in sadness, a slow-moving shuffle of mourning. The citizenry of Springfield took to scattering from his path, mumbling excuses and condolences, for they could not bear to witness up close the fresh, searing pain etched on his features.
Lincoln spent his nights next to me in bed, tossing and turning, and often calling out in wrenching sadness from the depths of his sleep. I had not the heart to ask what he saw in his dreams. Every morning when he awoke, his pillow was drenched with sweat.
Together with Herndon, Hay, and Martha, I organized an informal watch on Lincoln to try to prevent him from doing harm to himself. Especially in the first few days, when his distress was at its greatest depth, I worried he might take his own life. I removed the ball from the pistol I’d given him, and I confiscated all sharp objects from any place I thought he might frequent. We set up a rotating schedule of persons to follow him each day, at an unobtrusive distance. But the arrangement proved unnecessary, as Lincoln never seemed to wander very far from the town square, returning always to gaze forlornly at the apothecary where Miss Owens had breathed her last.
Lincoln’s suffering was confined, held tight within his breast, and shared with no one, not even me. After that first night at Hoffman’s Row, he had not said more than a dozen words to me and none, as far as I knew, to anyone else. He had not once spoken Miss Owens’s name aloud.
Meanwhile, the election campaign entered its final sprint, as voting was to take place exactly one week after Miss Owens’s death. Out of respect for the grieving Lincoln, all of the candidates reached an unspoken agreement not to discuss politics within his presence. Lincoln—and Lincoln alone—wrapped in his profound thoughts and indifferent to transpiring events, was ignorant of the ongoing banality and brutality of politics.
But in all other places in town, indeed all around the county, the raucous campaign careened toward its uncertain conclusion. Dinners were thrown, rallies were staged, speeches made, debates held, parades organized. Candidates schemed and connived. Voters gladly accepted favors and asked for more. Inducements flowed as freely as whiskey and quite often in the form of whiskey. The vote of every last man with the franchise was courted—propositioned, even—with a lascivious wantonness, a naked lust, which would have made a New Orleans madam blush.
Lincoln’s own reelection to the state legislature had seemed a foregone conclusion before Miss Owens’s death, and I figured that, if anything, the natural sympathy his current condition engendered would help his cause at the polls. As for Stuart’
s campaign against the detested Douglas for Congress, Stuart’s side made do without the aid of their principal speechmaker. Ninian Edwards and other Whigs pitched in with their own efforts, and the popular consensus was that the race remained on the knife’s edge, with Stuart perhaps carrying a slight advantage.
Sheriff Hutchason kept me apprised of the investigation into the bitter substance that had felled Miss Owens.
“Strychnine,” Hutchason told me confidently one morning on the green, several days after Miss Owens died.
“How do you know?”
“We found four substances in the apothecary having a similar taste, and Warren tried them out one by one on stray dogs he found around town. The doc was quite eager to do so, in point of fact. The progress of medical knowledge and all that.
“Anyway, Warren said when he fed a good quantity of strychnine to a dog, it reacted just the way Miss Owens must have. About fifteen minutes after ingesting the substance, the poor beast started having muscle spasms in waves. Eventually it threw the whole body into convulsion. The dog’s face went red as it gasped for breath. The lips peeled back, the eyes bulged. Finally, after three or four waves of attack, the dog expired from asphyxiation, with its body arched frozen from head to toe. Just as we found Miss Owens.”
I felt sick to my stomach. “What a horrible way to die.”
“I know it,” agreed Hutchason, looking very grave.
“And Owens actually carries strychnine in his apothecary?” I said.
“He tells me he dispenses it for persons under physical strain. He says it can have the effect of calming them. But in low doses only. Never more than a fiftieth of a grain per dispensation. He says he thinks two full grains are missing from his vial.”
“Could he have put them into her brandy by accident?”
“He swears up and down it would have been impossible. He says he didn’t give her any strychnine that morning. His standard female remedy is different. Something involving extract of elderflower seeds.”
“Then how did the strychnine get in her drink?” I asked. “I tell you, I never trusted Owens, what with all his potions and incantations.”
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