Ella Maud

by Nicholas Nicastro

  The boys released, expecting the end of the prayer. But their father continued, and they had to join hands again.

  “Almighty God, Father of all things merciful, we do give Thee most humble thanks for all Thy goodness, though we are unworthy. Show those who have failed in Your sight to right the wrongs they have committed, for all the reasons our mortal hearts might chose to do evil. Let their evil be uncovered, and let its architects be struck down for their many falsehoods, though they may have sat among us. Just as our Lord Jesus Christ, all glory upon His name, was betrayed by him who sat beside Him at table, at that last meal partook in His mortal life.

  “For whom but You, O Lord, might redeem such perfidy, such degradation of the free will You have gifted all men, in your wisdom? What greater sin is there than this, to join hands among the host of Thy children, with such evil at heart? What punishment is too harsh for them? What blackness may not be improved by Your fire? Almighty God, let Thy divine wisdom fix the means, but let retribution come to those who laugh now, and despise our suffering, so that they may be unmasked, and cast down, and erased from Thy creation like foul smudges upon Your divine parchment. Let Thy will be done.

  “And if not by Thy fury, O Lord, may the author of our misery, Jim Wilcox, find the decency that has eluded him so far, to confess the sin he has visited upon this house. Let his heart swell with its natural villainy, that it may not be contained anymore, but burst upon him, and inspire him upon Thy mercy. And let us beseech Thee, give us that due sense of all Thy wisdom, that our hearts may be thankful; and that we show forth Thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives. Let us walk before Thee in holiness and righteousness, our eyes fixed upon Heaven, through Jesus Christ our Lord, in all honor and glory, all of our days, world without end. Amen.”

  There was rising unease around the table as Cropsey’s prayer went on, until he included Jim Wilcox by name, and the tension burst in the open. Lettie let out an audible gasp at his mentioning. Ollie loosed a cold sweat. Mary Cropsey abandoned the threadbare expression of normalcy she had assumed on reaching the table, her face calcified by grief. When Cropsey was done speaking, there was a pause none of them was willing to transgress, until he grasped the serving fork and knife and, with a bit more brio than fit the occasion, flung forth the first portion of lamb.

  Ollie looked to Nell’s empty place. If she felt her presence since she’d gone, it was only fleetingly, and with guilt, for the presence of her ghost could only have meant that her body had given up her spirit. She would have preferred to sense nothing. But the spirit of her father’s prayer was so detestable it would surely have drawn a rebuke from Nell, had she heard it. Ollie thought she felt a thickening of the atmosphere around her place, as if a strange energy was gathering in the room. She both dreaded and desired to hear her voice again, manifested out of the air, so thin it might break, bright with the gleam of her rightness. She stared at Nell’s chair, engrossed, until she became aware of William Douglas nudging her in the arm, and saying “Hey. HEY! Pass the dressing over here, will ya?”

  “You forget your manners, young man?” chided his father.

  “No, my fault…” said Ollie, and delivered the bowl.

  That very moment, less than a mile away at their house on the corner of Martin and Shepard Streets, the Wilcox family also gathered around their table. Jim’s father Thomas was likewise at the head, holding forth on current affairs. For his part, the former Sheriff saw no need to dress his feelings in a dust-ruffle of piety.

  “I don’t know what you did to those Cropseys, Jim, to deserve the way they talk about you.”

  “Hmm,” Jim replied.

  “There’s nothin’ logical about it. It’s not just that I’m your father. I’ve been around a few investigations, and I’ve never seen railroading as plain as this. There’s something else going on. I know it as clear as I know my right arm...”

  “Hear, hear.”

  “I swear it’s not even about you. It’s about the next go-round at the polls. They reckon this will keep a strong challenger off the ballot. Never good to see a Wilcox with a badge, they say. The usual dirty tricks…”

  “That may be,” warned Martha Wilcox, “but we don’t swear at table.”

  “I’d be surprised if she was even dead. Wouldn’t put it past Greenleaf and his gang to put her on a train to Chicago. Tell her to make the rounds at the shops on Michigan Avenue. She’ll turn up back here buried in hat boxes.”

  “My friend Kate has an uncle in the ice business,” Jim’s sister Annie piped up. “She says he said that the Cropseys are taking more than their share of block ice these days.”

  Wilcox stared, and slowly began to nod.

  “Is that a fact? Well that’s interesting. Do you think he’d testify to it?”

  “I don’t know him personal.”

  “Well, if we had a halfway competent sheriff, instead of wee Willie Dawson, there’d be an investigation. And the papers would have something else to talk about, instead of what comes out of old man Cropsey’s mouth.”

  “Think you might stand again, Pa?”

  “I’ve a mind to,” he replied, wagging his head in a manner that said that if he did, it would be a sacrifice done wholly out of civic duty, not personal ambition.

  “I can’t see how this is the right kind of table talk,” Jim spoke up.

  As all eyes turned to him, he went on, “I can’t speak to what Dawson’s after. But I can’t blame Cropsey for being beside himself, what with a daughter missing. I’d say just about anything if I were in his shoes. Paw, if Annie Mae were gone, would you be any better?”

  The old man’s jaw unhinged at this statement. When he found his voice he said, “That’s awful broad-minded of you, boy, considering that it’s your name—our name—they’re dragging through the mud.”

  “That may be. But I got nothing to do with it, so why should I concern myself? The truth will come clear. And if I can content myself with that, why can’t you?”

  Thomas Wilcox was going to respond, but Martha spoke first: “Oh, let it be. Can’t Christmas be one day we don’t talk about Nell Cropsey?”

  “Yes, please. They talk about nothing else around here!” declared Annie Mae.

  “I seem to be out-voted,” he said, and with a heave of resignation, turned his attention to feasting.

  II.

  After they got Nell to shore, they placed her on a cart. Ollie met them with a blanket to wrap her body—the very one they shared in bed. She managed to hold off tears until her father took the blanket from her. Then, as they rolled Nellie away, her legs weakened and she fell to her knees.

  It seemed indecent to leave her outside for all to see, yet also unfitting to exhibit the waterlogged remains in the parlor. Instead, they brought her around back, into the shed, and laid her on the workbench, face-up and feet toward the doors.

  They shut the shed in time to shield her from the crowd that gathered. It was maddening to William Cropsey, how quickly these layabouts and rubberneckers got wind of a spectacle unfolding. Did they not have business to attend to? It seemed to him the very essence of what was wrong with the world: too much idleness, too much prurience. He went out with a pistol and banished them all to the lines of the property. To Ollie, who gaped as he returned, he declared, “She was violated in life. I won’t see her violated now.”

  The first official to arrive was Sheriff Dawson. He seemed to have come right from his breakfast table, in suspenders with shirttails hanging out. When he saw Nell’s body in the shed he sucked his lips in disappointed fashion, as if he were hoping—absurdly—that the body, like so many others in recent weeks, would turn out not to be hers.

  “I’m so sorry, Bill,” he said.

  Cropsey muttered. Dawson couldn’t make out what he said, and didn’t ask.

  The coroner, Dr. Isaiah Fearing, came out next but stayed only a few moments.

  “Be back presently.”

  “Are you fetching a jury?” asked Dawson.


  “I need two more doctors to assist.”

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t call someone in?”

  “Come again?”

  “I don’t know, Ike. She’s been in the water a long time. Maybe someone who’s seen a case like this or two?”

  “I think we can manage one autopsy,” the other retorted.

  Soon the crowd swelled to what seemed like thousands. The more nimble climbed trees for a better view. Others brought opera glasses to get a glimpse of Nell’s splendid dead form. Dawson summoned every full- and part-time deputy he could to keep the throng back and under control. But the mob was already simmering with outrage; Jim’s name was heard, frequently attached to profanity.

  “That poor girl. Someone should give it to that goddamn Wilcox.”

  “I’d give cash money to see that bastard hanged!”

  “Shot!”

  “Shot and then hanged!”

  Fearing returned by ten o’clock with two other men. Ollie, who was watching from the window, did not recognize them, but could guess their functions from what they carried: a doctor’s black bag, and a stenographer’s notebook.

  The coroner faced the crowd and asked for volunteers to serve as jurors for the inquest. A hundred arms rose, and Fearing picked six men to serve.

  They gathered in front of the closed doors of the shed and lit cigarettes for each other. The temperature rose beyond fifty degrees, and some of the men removed their jackets. None of them seemed in a hurry to get to their task. Nor did any member of the Cropsey family come near. The closest was William Cropsey, who was helping to hold back the crowd.

  A last man arrived: the Cropsey family doctor, Dr. Wood. He gave a curt nod at the other attending physicians: “Ike. Dr. McMullan.”

  He then wished the jurors a “good morning” without thinking about how, under the circumstances, those words sounded.

  With that, Dawson opened the shed doors. The space was tight and windowless, and smelled of sawdust and old fodder. The men crowded around the bench where the body lay, gazing at it. Dawson would have closed the doors after them, but Fearing stopped him.

  “We’ll need the light, Bill.”

  “All right,” replied the other. Then to his deputies—“You fellows! Form a line!” And his men assembled at the open door, facing outward, to block the crowd’s view of what would happen next.

  Fearing opened his bag and withdrew a pair of rubber gloves and a scalpel.

  “Who will dictate?”

  The doctors looked blankly at each other until McMullan shrugged.

  “I will,” he said. “Mr. Sykes, are you ready?”

  The stenographer nodded.

  “Subject is Ella Maud Cropsey, a nineteen year-old female…” McMullan began.

  “Twenty,” corrected Wood.

  “Correction, twenty. She is dressed in a red waist with plain brass buttons, collar of same color, black leather belt, and a black skirt with—” And he flipped up the hem of her skirt—“black stockings. She is wearing a single rubber slipper on the left foot. The right foot is unclad. There is a bandage on her right big toe. The clothing appears to be in good order, no evident tearing or stretching…”

  Fearing undid the bandage and showed the toe to McMullen.

  “The bandage covered a corn on the right large toe. Injury is not connected to subject’s death…”

  After rotating the body to confirm the condition of the clothing on her back side, the doctors commenced to strip her naked. The six lay jurymen watched this with sheepish fascination. J.B. Ferebee, a barber, remembered when he had last seen her—on Main Street, walking with one of her sisters. She was a fine-looking filly, fit and proud and far beyond the kind that would ever glance twice at a mere tradesman like him. Yet here was that magnificent girl now, prostrate and stripped to the skin before his eyes.

  They left the stockings on her. The doctors did so without needing to agree on it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Wouldn't they want to check for bruises or whatnot on her legs? It seemed like they should. But Ferebee was only a barber, and lacked the confidence to raise his voice.

  “The body is waterlogged but generally in a good state of preservation,” McMullan continued. “There is no bloating. No saponification. There is no evidence of scavenging, not even at the extremities. The skin is entirely intact, not split, with no evidence of violence or trauma…Does the skin tone appear normal to you, Dr. Wood?”

  “It does not.”

  “The skin tone is dark, perhaps due to long exposure to river water…”

  Fearing placed a hand on her forehead, as if he were about to tousle her hair. A transparent sheet came off on his fingers; when he grasped a tuft of hair, it all came out in his hand.

  “The epidermis separates from the dermis, as expected in such cases…”

  Fearing took up his scalpel, and as the jurymen held their breath, cut into Nell’s abdomen just below the breastbone. He drew the incision down, to just above her pubis. There was, of course, no spurting of blood, the tissue parting like a somewhat overdone pudding. Two of the jurors looked away.

  Upon pulling her apart, Fearing reached in and, after much cutting, withdrew a body in the shape of small, red purse.

  “The uterus is of normal size and empty. The hymen is…?

  Fearing pried between her legs and nodded to McMullan.

  “Yes…it is intact.”

  Thus assured of her chastity, they proceeded to the other organs. Fearing cut open the stomach and found no water, just a small amount of semi-digested food. After extracting the breastbone, he found both chambers of the heart empty. The lungs were collapsed. Fearing cut away a piece the size of a small book and put it into a bowl of water. It bobbed like a cork. Then he took another piece and pressed it between his hands, expelling some air and a small amount—no more than a teaspoon or two—of bloody froth.

  “Why, she’s as dry as a bone,” remarked Wood.

  “No ecchymose in the lungs. They are of normal color. The lack of water in the stomach, heart, lungs or pleural cavity do not support drowning as the principal cause of death…”

  Fearing probed further, but less than a hour after they’d started, he was at the limit of his expertise. The doctors and jurymen stood around nervously; to the question they were all asking, “Did she throw herself in the river or was she murdered?”, the body offered no clear testimony. Her virtue was not violated. She was not assaulted—at least in any way that would leave a mark. And yet the lack of water in her system hinted that she was dead before she entered the river. Or did it? The doctors struggled to remember pages of textbooks they had studied years ago. As he separated Nell’s aorta from her heart, Fearing wondered if should have reviewed the relevant pages of Taylor & Reese’s Manual of Medical Jurisprudence before he arrived. But where did he leave it now—in his office, or on his home bookshelf?

  “I’d say she’s no more drowned than I am,” he declared.

  “I wouldn’t swear to that, Ike,” replied McMullan.

  “Isn’t there something odd about her head?” Ferebee asked.

  The doctors looked at him as if a rabid animal had slipped into the room. But Ferebee wouldn’t be silent this time: in his profession as a barber, he had experience with heads at least.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her left temple looks…I don't know…swollen.”

  “Show us.”

  Ferebee stepped forward and pressed his index finger against Nell’s temple. The impression his fingertip made did not spring back.

  The coroner turned the head back and forth.

  “That’s completely normal. We expect a body in the water that long to show evidence of dropsy. Look here…”

  Fearing poked at Nell’s left aureole. The flesh yielded and stayed depressed.

  Ferebee shook his head. “That doesn’t seem quite the same to me.”

  With that, the autopsy was declared complete. Mr. Sykes shut his notebook, and Fearing put his too
ls back in his bag. When the men emerged from the shed, Sheriff Dawson hailed them:

  “So what's the verdict, fellows?”

  “There’s still some discussion,” replied Fearing. In fact, he was still preoccupied with the whereabouts of Taylor & Reese.

  When he got to his home he found the text in his book case. He sat at his desk for some time reviewing it. There were twenty-one dense pages that addressed cases of drowning, and as he read them he became more and more dissatisfied with the morning’s work. He had, in fact, only performed two post mortems before this one, and never on a victim who had drowned. Obviously he needed to examine the body again. But would that amount to an admission of incompetence on his part?

  Around one in the afternoon, Charlie Reid came to his rescue. Standing in his foyer, hat in hand, the deputy reported that the jurymen were making the rounds of the saloons, complaining that the autopsy had been a waste of time. He seemed apologetic, but keen for Fearing’s response. To his surprise, the doctor reached for his coat.

  “Well, we ought to go back, then. I believe we did a thorough job, but we can’t leave the public in any doubt.”

  It took until three p.m. to reassemble the doctors and the jury. By this time the crowd outside the house had dispersed, and there was only one deputy guarding the shed.

  “Back for more?” the deputy asked.

  Inside, Fearing had them reverse the body, so they could get more daylight on the head.

  “Now let’s see about this…” Fearing said.

  Starting on the right side, he cut around the crown of Nell’s skull. When he reached her left temple, blood coursed down her ear and onto the table. He completed the incision and, with a firm tug, removed the entire scalp.

  Ferebee gulped. He had been around heads and hair all his life, but seeing a person in this condition, scalp of chestnut hair in a heap, blue-white dome of the skull exposed, made him feel he had never truly seen a human body. The sight was so discomfiting that he barely heard McMullan vindicate his suspicions: