Murder in a mill town (17 page)

Nell smiled to herself at the notion that Will had finally stumbled across a word too foul, even by his lax standards, to repeat in her presence.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Nell said. “From all accounts, Virgil was besotted with Bridie. Yet he knew she was at Harry’s beck and call during work hours. Most men could never live with that.”

Will shrugged as he brought his cigarette to his mouth. “It would appear he’d found a way to.”

“It’s just hard to imagine.”

“Love is a curious malady. The symptoms vary widely among its sufferers.”

Nell turned her head to look at him through a sun-washed haze of cigarette smoke as he lay next to her on this bare wooden floor. He met her eyes through the glittering veil, holding her gaze with an odd kind of stillness for about two seconds, whereupon she looked away and sat up.

“We should check out that barn,” she said as she dusted off the sleeves of her dress, “and the field between the house and the orchard, where that smell came from.”

“You go ahead.” Will gained his feet with some effort, favoring his bad leg, then held out his hand to help her up. “I’m going to put things right in here. I’d hate to leave it like this—” he gestured toward the disassembled table and emptied out writing box “—when we found it so tidy. I’ll meet you out there.”

*   *   *

The barn was much as Nell had expected. It reeked of sour straw, and was empty but for such detritus as a rusted-out wheelbarrow and a ladder missing half its rungs. There was a woodpile behind the barn that was half-split, and a chopping block with an axe stuck in it. Her most interesting discovery was the fact that Virgil Hines was evidently repairing the brick chimney on the north side of the house, crumbled sections having been replaced with new bricks, freshly mortared. He must have been pretty confident that Duncan’s “dimund braslits” were forthcoming.

Nell reentered the house through the back door, which led into the junk-filled rear parlor. Upon opening the door into the front room, she found that Will had finished tidying up and was now seated on the small fruit crate in his shirtsleeves, the left sleeve rolled high above the elbow, thrusting a silver hypodermic syringe into his upper arm.

He looked toward her standing in the doorway, his fleeting expression of dismay swiftly replaced by that cool British stoicism he was so good at. There was a bleakness in his eyes, though, a hint of something close to shame. His arm bore clusters of needle marks and bruises.

Will thumbed the plunger home, injecting a dose of morphine into his left deltoid. A second passed. He let out a sigh, his eyes half closed, and withdrew the syringe.

She said, “You’re better than this.”

“If I were,” he said as he unscrewed the needle, “I wouldn’t be doing it, would I?”

The field beyond the orchard was a sprawling acre or so of dried grass and weeds dotted with the occasional tree. Given Nell’s cumbersome skirts, she chose to inspect the section near the house and barn, where the grass wasn’t quite so high, while Will directed his search toward the field’s heavily treed eastern perimeter. She glanced up every now and then to see his black-clad form growing steadily smaller as he waded slowly through the swaying wheat-gold grass, his long strides relatively smooth and graceful.

Nell was thankful for the light breeze, which kept her from perspiring too badly despite the fierce midday sun. After a while, she unpinned her black straw bonnet and repinned it at a more front-tilted angle, the better to prevent her face from freckling, or worse, tanning. As she did so, she glanced toward Will to find him standing still near the trees at far the edge of the field, looking down at something she couldn’t see.

He’d taken off his hat.

Lifting her skirts indecently high, Nell strode toward him as swiftly as she could through the crackling grass, the smell of decaying flesh growing stronger with every step. Will glanced up at her once as she neared, his expression grim. When she was about twenty feet away, the breeze lifted a few strands of something near his feet that fluttered above the level of the grass, glinting in the sunlight like spun copper.

My Bridie, she’s got the prettiest red hair you ever seen—shines like heaven itself when the sun hits it just right.

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.