Louisa and the Missing Heiress Read online

  Preston Wortham continued to pace and tear at his hair, and in a few moments Edith and Sarah also rose to leave. He paid no attention to them but let Digby see to their wraps and the door.

  I sat on the silk sofa across from Edgar, and waited. This was no longer a formal call, so for once I felt permitted to remove my hemisphere hat. I leaned into the sofa, prepared to stay until Dottie arrived, and then find the cause of this odd behavior. I felt a strange twinge in my chest, a sadness not yet named but already being born. The whole affair was quite alarming.

  There was no pretense of conversation. I had the eerie feeling that we were all characters out of one of my tales. The friend, waiting, terrified. The indifferent brother who stayed simply because he had no other engagements. The husband, guilty, already remorseful about words shouted in the morning over coffee or perhaps the evening before . . . or perhaps guilty of a deed worse than a raised voice.

  Perhaps Preston Wortham had struck his wife. Perhaps Dot, at this very moment, was in her mother’s parlor, weeping out the tale. A black eye would certainly keep a new bride from her own tea party. But was Mr. Wortham capable of violence? And if that were the scenario, why hadn’t Dot sent us all a note telling us not to come this afternoon?

  No. It was worse than an uncontrolled squabble. Much worse. I was not leaving the parlor till I knew what had happened to my old friend.

  An hour later the doorbell rang once more. Sylvia was reading a scurrilous newspaper she had found; I had borrowed a book from the Wortham library. And so I looked up from my preoccupied perusal of The Scarlet Letter, hoping it was Dot, and that Dot had merely forgotten her appointment, forgotten her key . . . and knowing it was not.

  Preston Wortham, now slumped in a chair and staring morosely into thin air, let Digby answer the bell.

  The manservant returned a moment later, followed by a tall, red-haired stranger wearing a loud plaid suit and a leather badge on his chest. A nightstick dangled from his right hand and in his left hand he held his quickly doffed stovepipe hat.

  “Constable Cobban of the Boston Watch and Police,” he announced, pausing in the arched doorway.

  When I saw Constable Cobban, I knew my world had shifted a little on its axis. I had a premonition that Dottie and I would never have our talk.

  “Are you Mr. Wortham?” the man asked, looking with obvious distaste at Edgar Brownly, whose tight scarlet waistcoat had popped a button and gaped over his belly.

  “No, I am Mr. Wortham.” Preston Wortham stood and did not extend his hand. A paid rather than volunteer safety patrol was new to Boston, and the social status of the new policemen was uncertain.

  “I have terrible news, I’m afraid. . . .” The constable looked nervously in our direction. “Perhaps the ladies should leave the room?”

  “Out with it! Tell us!” Preston Wortham shouted, unable to control himself.

  “Mrs. Wortham . . .” He paused.

  “She has been in an accident? A carriage . . . she doesn’t realize how quickly they go, sometimes, especially the light two-horse-drawn . . . Has she been injured?” Mr. Wortham was frantic.

  “No, sir. I mean, maybe, sir.” The man cleared his throat. He had been gently swinging the nightstick in his right hand, but now it fell motionless to his side. “Fact is, sir, she’s drowned. Found her at the landing down by the Customs House.”

  Sylvia and I gasped; Wortham grew strangely calm, and smiled.

  “Well, then,” he said with hearty good humor, “it can’t be her. She had no business down by the wharves. It is not her part of town. You’ve come to the wrong house. Yes, the wrong house.” He rocked back and forth on his heels with relief.

  The patrolman cleared his throat once more. “Sir,” he said, “we must, of course, have a proper identification of the person. But the fact is, her purse was in her hand and we found some correspondence in it with her name on it, and this address.”

  “Constable, have you brought the purse with you?” I stood and extended my hand toward him.

  “Ah. Yes. A little wet there, miss . . .” He passed me the sodden needlepoint bag, its design of roses and cupids now almost buried under harbor muck. I showed it to Preston.

  “It’s Dot’s. Oh, God!” He groaned, sitting back down.

  Slowly, with a little click, I twisted the purse open and gazed inside at a handkerchief with a fancy D embroidered in the corner, a little gold case that, when forced open, revealed several of Dot’s own calling cards, and a soggy and disintegrating envelope addressed to Mrs. Preston Wortham. There was nothing else in the purse. Looking back, I realize this was the moment that my mental training, aided by judicious reading of Poe, began to take effect. It began with a simple conjecture: The moneyless purse seemed odd, sinister perhaps, for, even when out for a mere walk, a lady did not leave home without a coin purse for tipping doormen and such.

  No one had spoken after the officer made his announcement. Preston seemed to be in a state of incomprehension, frowning and trying to make sense of the aberrant situation, as if English had become a foreign language. Edgar had put down his teacup and sat with his hands in his lap, pressing his thumbs against each other and grimacing.

  “This will seem the stupidest of questions, Constable, but by any chance was there a bakery box found with the body? Perhaps floating, and with a raisin cake inside?” I asked.

  Constable Cobban frowned at what he perceived to be a strange, even trivial, question. “No, miss. No cake. But we will need someone to come to the morgue and properly identify the body.”

  “The morgue.” Preston Wortham’s voice was terrible. “My Dottie . . . No, it isn’t possible. This is a mistake. We breakfasted together. She had tea and toast and marmalade. She gave half her toast to Lily. . . .”

  “Lily?” Cobban repeated.

  “Her little spaniel,” I told him.

  “Ah,” the officer said. He studied his shoes.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Well, there was a dog found with the woman. Drowned, just like her.”

  “Oh, Dottie.” I sighed. It was the dog, finally, that convinced us, that made this truth inescapable. The tears gathered and clouded my vision, and I felt them rolling down my pale cheeks.

  But it was Preston Wortham who rolled his eyes up, went limp at the knees, and fell to the floor in a faint. Just like the husband would in a play.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Reflections at the Morgue

  AS PRESTON SEEMED unable to attend to the tragic task alone, none of the terrible siblings seemed to have a free hour (suddenly Edgar had acquired a whole Wall Street of appointments), and Dottie’s mother was an invalid, it was left to me to accompany Mr. Wortham to the morgue that afternoon to certify whether or not the drowning victim was, indeed, his wife, Dot.

  The morgue was a rough, cold room beneath City Hall, poorly lit, but even the few gas lamps revealed all too clearly the face and figure of Mrs. Preston Wortham, née Dorothy Brownly, there on the morgue table.

  She had been twenty-one years of age. Young to die, I thought, studying her through swimming eyes. Dot’s hair and clothes had dried but still clung to her, almost lovingly, as if reluctant to be parted from the spirit that had brightened them for so short a time.

  Yet there was no way that Dot’s stillness could masquerade as a simple sleep. The river had left moss and weeds in her hair and streaming over her bosom. Her little black shoes were slippery with slime and bursting at the lacings because the water had already begun to bloat the body. Her quilted silk and fur coat was now matted and stiff and of indistinguishable color, and her once white blouse was stained brownish yellow. Her hands—dainty hands that had once been declared her one beauty—those hands were blue and stiff and cold, the skin swollen tightly around her garnet-anddiamond wedding ring. There was no sign of Lily, the puppy. Of course, the city of Boston would not waste money on a simple dog. Its little body had probably been tossed into a dustbin for disposal. Poor Dot. She would have wanted Lily to be buri
ed in the garden next to the puppies and cats of her childhood, with a proper marker and a memorial climbing rose.

  Preston Wortham looked so terrible I asked him, “Are you able to bear this? Shall I take you into the outer room?”

  He gulped and his eyes blinked, but he stood his ground.

  “I am . . . as well as can be imagined. Thank you for coming with me, Miss Alcott.” He turned away from Dot’s corpse and looked faintly about for a bench or chair, but there was none. There was nothing but death in the room, and regret, and those are not substantial enough for a man of weak character to lean upon.

  The morgue attendant was a small, mustachioed man whose eyes seemed not much brighter than those of the corpses resting on the marble slabs in the room. He wore a white apron much smeared and stained with ghastly substances that I chose not to contemplate. When Preston turned away, he moved as if to draw the sheet back over Dot’s head. Constable Cobban stayed his hand. He had removed his hat, so that his thick ginger-colored hair stood about his head like a halo, a strange effect for a man of his profession.

  “Well?” asked that young officer.

  “It is my wife. It is Mrs. Preston Wortham. Dorothy. Dottie.” Wortham’s voice was unsteady and low. “She slipped, of course. It was a wet day; she wore little leather shoes instead of sturdier boots. She slipped into the river. There is no question of suicide,” he said.

  I held my breath and would not look at him. Had Dorothy been so unhappy she had ended her own life?

  “I asked only for identification, not explanation,” young Cobban said. I realized then that death is never simple, especially when the dead person is young, healthy, and extraordinarily wealthy.

  “She will have a consecrated burial,” Preston murmured.

  “No one has mentioned suicide,” Constable Cobban repeated.

  Wortham once more bent over the body and placed a kiss on the cold white forehead. His task completed, he turned to leave this room of death.

  “Brownly? Was that her maiden name?” Constable Cobban called after him.

  Preston turned back in his direction. “It was. Come along, Miss Alcott; you appear overly strained.” Though it was he who had turned white and then green.

  “In a moment, Mr. Wortham,” I remember saying, bending over Dot so I could also give her a final kiss.

  How peaceful Dot looked. I hoped that indeed she was at peace, that she had forgiven all there was to forgive and been forgiven her own sins. What sins could young, kind Dot have ever committed? She had been goodness itself. But what had she said yesterday? There is so much sorrow here, so much worry, because of me. What had she meant?

  “May I?” I said to Constable Cobban, who stood next to her now, ready to pull the sheet back over Dot’s face since that identification had been completed. “I would like to keep her scarf as a memento mori. . . .”

  “Of course. I don’t suppose Mr. Wortham would object, so why should I?” Cobban said gruffly.

  I felt his strange pale eyes watching me, and my fingers grew awkward and could not undo the knot in her scarf.

  More gently, Cobban said, “Let me untangle it for you, Miss Alcott. It may be difficult and . . .” He did not finish, but I knew what he meant: Now that the final kiss had been given, it was frightening, gruesome, to have to touch that body from which the spirit of my friend had departed. Dot was fled from here, and all that remained was an emptied vessel, a broken promise.

  With surprising gentleness, Sergeant Cobban raised the corpse’s head just enough so that the scarf could be unknotted and pulled away. Because rigor mortis was already setting in, the whole torso lifted at an unnatural angle, as if a board had been slipped into her garments to keep her straight, as some mothers did with new babes. One of Dot’s mud-stiffened curls fell out of the snood that captured them, and swung down over the table. I could not help feeling dizzy, but I stood my ground.

  “Here,” Sergeant Cobban said, pulling the scarf free and handing it to me. And because Sergeant Cobban was looking at me, and not the corpse, and Wortham was already hovering near the door, either consumed by nausea and grief or simply distracted, I was the first to see them: little blue bruises on both sides of the neck.

  “What’s this?”

  Constable Cobban saw my eyes narrow with concentration and surprise. He leaned closer to the body, poked gently with his fingertips at the marks, rubbed them slightly as if hoping they might erase. They did not.

  “Well, now,” he said, standing upright and rocking on his heels, deep in thought. “Indeed, this puts the case in a new light entirely.” Cobban hailed the morgue attendant, who had been sitting at a zinc table reading a book. We could see the title: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

  The mustachioed attendant put down his book and sprinted over to the officer’s side. Obviously he knew Cobban, and knew Cobban was a man you didn’t keep waiting.

  “Postmortem on this woman,” Cobban ordered.

  “We’re backed up . . .” the attendant started to protest, then changed his mind. “Two days,” he said.

  “Tomorrow morning,” Cobban said.

  “Postmortem?” Preston Wortham, who had been leaning against the wall nearest the door, burying his hands in the armpits of his wool coat and stamping his feet against the cold of the room, paid attention once again to what was going on a few yards away. “Does that mean an autopsy? Since when is an autopsy done on a suici—I mean an accident victim? I won’t allow the desecration of poor Dot. . . .”

  “Mr. Wortham, there must be a postmortem. Wouldn’t you like to know exactly how your young wife died?” There was a note in Constable Cobban’s voice that made Wortham uncomfortable. I peered expectantly at him, eager for his answer.

  “I know how she died,” the husband insisted. “She slipped and fell and drowned. And now I am going to visit her minister and arrange the funeral.”

  “Three days. That’s when the funeral will be,” Cobban insisted. “Unless you want the body disinterred. The bruises make it a case needing further examination. Medical jurisprudence will be required.” Cobban would not be moved. He had decided.

  “Bruises?” Preston moved closer and peered down at his wife’s exposed neck. He blanched and swallowed hard, then looked defiantly at Cobban.

  The two men glared at each other. Preston was the first to drop his eyes. “Well, if you believe it is necessary,” he said. “But on point of order, I protest this autopsy, as will the rest of the family. Not all in the family are without influence,” he added.

  “I have heard of the Brownlys,” Cobban said icily. “I know Mrs. Brownly will try to have my head on a platter. But she won’t get it. Now I suggest you all go home. You’ve had a shock.” And to make his point, Cobban ushered us to the door, as if we were children dismissed from school.

  I turned to him. “I would like to view the postmortem. They do require witnesses, don’t they?”

  “Miss Alcott,” protested Preston. “Remember that you are a lady! It is unfit, outrageous!”

  And that (I knew such comments gave rise to stubbornness within myself that rivaled my father’s!) made me insist that I would view it.

  “A full jury will view, as the law requires,” Cobban said. “Because of your relationship to the deceased and her husband you may not be part of that jury, but I will arrange a place for you to sit among them. Are you certain, Miss Alcott? A postmortem is not an easy thing to view.”

  “I am certain,” I said. A strong determination was firing through my backbone, a determination to search for the truth about Dot.

  Cobban studied me as if he were looking for something. He found it. “Tomorrow at ten promptly,” he said. As I left, he touched my shoulder, a gesture between a comforting pat and a discreet push. I could not help but wonder: Was that a great tenderness or just polite attention to a lady?

  “Take a carriage home, Miss Alcott. The streets are dark now,” he said. “And dangerous.”

  “I’ll see to the lady,” Preston said,
his voice heavy with noblesse oblige.

  As I rode home in Preston Wortham’s carriage, I tried to stop seeing Dot, cold in the morgue, and attempted to distract my racing mind by turning my inner eye to a portrait of home, how it would be when I arrived. Abba would still be in the kitchen, kneading biscuit dough for tomorrow. Lizzie would probably be wih her, helping, and May would be in bed, reading a novel. Father would be in his study, preparing a lecture, probably on the free soil movement and abolition. The front door would be unlocked, even though there was no servant to keep watch over the comings and goings of the house, and even though most of Boston not only bolted their doors but added additional bracing. We had no worldly goods to protect and worry over. Yet that home was a paradise.

  Poor Dorothy. What had her home, first with her mother then with her husband, been like?

  Dorothy was dead. There had been bruises. And whatever had Dot been doing down by the wharves in that part of town?

  “WE WILL HAVE to order a wreath, and I must mend my black bombazine for the funeral,” I told Sylvia. “The protocols of grief must be observed. I once thought mourning and its many rules to be old-fashioned and melodramatic; loss now teaches me otherwise.”

  It was the next day, and we were back in the attic. The sheet of paper in front of me was blank. For once I was silenced and literally unable to write. The paper had blisters where mine and Sylvia’s tears had fallen on it.

  “What did Abba say?” Sylvia asked.

  “To trust in God’s mercy. We wept together and she is being brave, but it has affected her. So much death . . .”

  I showed Sylvia my journal entry, about the dreams of the night before . . . a dream of Dottie as she had been as a child, still in the schoolroom, shy yet brave, slow to memorize dates and names but quick to sense a storm coming, or a puppy on the verge of illness. The dreams were mostly rehearsals of what had been, as are most dreams of loss, but in some moments Dottie turned away from the familiar gestures of childhood and stared into my eyes. “So much to talk about, dear Louy,” Dottie said. As she spoke I woke up, still hearing her gentle voice.