The Truth of All Things

A
t the sound of footsteps in the alley, Maggie Keene dimmed the gas lamp and sidled up to the room’s only window. She eased the curtains aside, her fingers barely touching the paper-thin material for fear it might tear and crumble. The gap between two neighboring tenement houses allowed a slice of moonlight to pierce the narrow passageway below. A man in a brown derby hurried past, stepping over the remains of a smashed crate. The splintered boards lay scattered on the ground like animal bones bleached a ghastly white by long exposure.

Maggie cupped a hand against the glass and peered in the other direction. There was still no sign of John. Her eyes drifted past the lights of the Grand Trunk Railway Station, down toward the waterfront of Portland, Maine. The harbor was a dark canvas, interrupted only by a scattering of ships’ lamps bobbing on the tide. She smiled at a faint memory: fireflies hovering over a field on a summer night. She clung to the image for a few seconds until the distant lights began to blur. The laudanum mixture made her feel remote and empty. It threatened to lull her to sleep until a familiar pain twisted in her gut. A vague, unformed prayer sped through her mind, begging God to let her be all right.

She reached for the small brown medicine bottle on the nightstand. Against the light of the gas jet, Maggie saw that it was almost empty, even though John had given it to her only yesterday. It helped the cramps, but she worried that she’d be doubled over again when she woke, the same as most mornings that week. She sat on the edge of the bed and gazed around the room, searching for a distraction from the pain. The place bordered on spare, but it was clean, with a sitting area, a fireplace, and even a private water closet. The only thing she missed was a clock.

John had promised to be back no later than midnight. Maggie knew
he’d return, since he paid for the room. He’d even left behind his precious notebook, the one he was always patting his coat for, making sure it was safe in his pocket. The desire to peek inside it washed over her, but she let that thought tumble back into the deep. Even if she could undo the book’s locked clasp, she had never been to school and struggled with even simple passages from a child’s primer. Another cramp snaked its way through her gut. She drained the last of the little brown bottle, then poured a glass of water to rinse the taste from her mouth.

Maggie wished John would hurry up and get back. Then he could finally show her what he’d been hiding. He would reveal to her the truth of all things; that was how he’d phrased it. Then they would toast his shattering success. Just John puffing himself up, of course, but the thought still made her smile. It would be nice to celebrate something more than turning out a drunk stiff’s pockets and finding loose change. She reached for the black hat she’d bought that day and looked at her reflection in the window. It was impossible to tell from the faint image staring back, but she knew she was paler than usual.

The sound of a step on the outside stairs stirred her back to the moment. There was the quick ascent of boots, and she met him at the door as the knob twisted.

“I was starting to wonder,” she said. “Everything all right?”

“Everything is”—he struggled for several seconds to produce the right word—“perfect.”

He had these moments of silent effort, and Maggie had already learned to act as if she didn’t notice the awkward pauses. John brought her forward onto the landing. He slipped into the room and extinguished the light. Maggie heard him fumbling in the dark before he reappeared and led her down the stairs

“So where are we going anyways?”

“Patience, my dear. You’ll see … soon enough.”

“Always such a mystery with you.”

He smiled. “Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep … but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of
an eye … at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead … shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”

“What are you on about? Better not start preaching at me.”

He gave a chuckle. “Just a bit to start you on the way.”

Maggie’s mind was drifting into the haze of the laudanum; she didn’t take any notice of how thin and raspy his laugh sounded. It held no warmth or humor and was instantly swallowed up by the night air. She stumbled on the uneven ground and then felt John’s grip on her arm as he guided her into the darkness.

Deputy Marshal Archie Lean stood in the Portland Company’s cavernous machine shop. He wasn’t quite as trim as when he’d first joined the police a decade ago, but he still retained the sturdy build developed in his youthful days as a boxer and rugby football player. He doffed his hat and tugged on a handful of sandy hair, as if he could somehow forcibly extract an explanation from his spinning mind. Lean pulled out his notebook and glanced at his earlier jottings under the heading of 6-14-92. Halfway down the page, he caught sight of two lines of poetry that he didn’t recall writing: “She seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years.” He crossed out the lines. Lean needed to focus his thoughts, so he lit a cigarette, his fourth in the hour since he’d first seen the body. Maybe he could make it the rest of the day without another. His wife hated the smell on him, but he knew that Emma wouldn’t mind once she heard what he’d seen tonight.

Dr. Steig had stepped out a few minutes earlier, and Lean was now alone with the woman’s body for the first time. The wooden floor planks had been pried up and removed, exposing a roughly circular patch of dark earth about eight feet in diameter upon which the body now lay. A pitchfork stood before him, plunged into the dirt. Two of the prongs ran straight through the young woman’s neck, pinning her to the ground. She was on her back, arms out to the sides, her legs spread apart. A burned-out lump of candle tallow sat just below her right foot. She still wore her long black skirt, dark hose just visible at
the ankles, and black leather shoes. Her white blouse, black coat, and several other garments had been removed and stacked neatly several yards away. Although she was naked from the waist up, that had not been immediately apparent at a distance. Two long cuts crisscrossed her chest. Blood, drying darkly, covered nearly all her torso, though her arms were a ghostly white. Her right arm was severed at the wrist, a pool of blood where the missing hand should be.

The deputy was no stranger to bodies that had met a violent end. They were mostly men, older ones who had lived out a decent portion of their allotted years. At least it seemed that way, since they typically led hard, unforgiving lives that aged them prematurely and sped them on to their ends. Doubtless, Maggie Keene was on a similar road that would have robbed her of any final traces of hope and innocence in a short time, but earlier that night she had been young and alive.