Louisa and the Missing Heiress (6 page)

Preston Wortham turned beet red with anger.

“Perhaps if her own family had been more sympathetic to her nature, Dot wouldn’t have wandered so far from home when she made her vows,” he growled at Alfreda. “She told me about her sixteenth birthday, when for a gift you brought a physician who specialized in weight reduction!”

“For her own good. She had spent the summer in Newport and ate too many ices!” Alfreda roared back, and then jumped, surprised that she had raised her own voice.

“I think this kind of conversation will do us little good,” I suggested, stepping between them, for Mr. Wortham had clenched his fist and seemed on the verge of violence. The doorbell rang again. Digby quit the parlor and returned with the Misses Sarah and Edith Brownly.

“Oh my,” Edith said. “Dot has done it again, hasn’t she?”

“We had better get to the bottom of this,” I said. “Digby, did she by any chance lose her hat again today?”

The irony was not lost on Digby. He smiled ever so slightly. “No, miss, not that I know of.”

“Did she say where she was going? Do you know when she went out?”

“No, miss. On both accounts.” Digby seemed a man of few words.

The parlor maid giggled louder and raised her hand. “Miss,” she said softly.

Mr. Wortham, his black hair standing on end, turned to the little maid and roared, “Speak up! Speak up!”

“Well, sir, if you yell at me like that . . .”

“I’m sorry, Brigid. Tell me, please, what you know of Mrs. Wortham’s absence,” he said in a low voice between grinding teeth.

“She went out to buy a raisin cake, sir.”

“A raisin cake?” four voices shouted at once.

“I’ll be damned,” said Preston Wortham. “I wonder if she’s got herself in the family way. This just is not like Dot!”

“Quite so,” agreed Alfreda. “Though I must add that any discussion of . . . of . . . is completely out of place in the front parlor.”

“Discussion of what?” asked Edgar Brownly, appearing in the curtained doorway. “I let myself in,” he said. “No one seemed to hear the bell ring. What is the commotion?”

He was breathing quickly, panting almost, as if he had been running or in some way exerting his large frame. I noticed a water stain darkening the hem of his trouser legs and I looked to the window, where the cold winter sun still shone, though it was low in the sky.

“Ah,” Edgar wheezed, looking at the group. “Dot is not here.”

Digby tried to placate us with tea and sandwiches and seedcake, but the cold silence that filled the parlor as Dottie’s family sat on silk-covered settees and carved armchairs and again began their wait was palpable. Silver spoons tinkled against thin bone china; somewhere from deeper in the house a canary sang. Edgar slurped his tea. Alfreda sniffed. Sarah and Edith sat stiffly close to each other, one right-handed, the other left-handed, reflecting two images of the same person drinking tea and nibbling at cake.

“Well,” Alfreda said after ten minutes, looking more like a Medusa than ever. “I’ll not return. Tell that to Dottie. Digby, my wrap.” And she sailed out of the room, her indignation puffing out her thin chest and making her sharp chin jut like a ship’s prow. Her steps grew dim; a door quietly shut. Alfreda Thorney did not slam doors, even when her patience was tested beyond endurance.

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.

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 buried 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?