The morning mist had begun its slow creep back to the river when Una ascended from the basement. But the morgue, an old, single-story building at the far end of the lawn, was still shrouded in a patchy white haze. She heard Edwin’s footsteps on the stairs behind her but didn’t slow and was glad when he didn’t follow her beyond the gravel drive. She couldn’t think of him now, what he’d said, what she hadn’t said in return. She could only think of Deidre.
To enter the morgue, Una passed through a small paved courtyard that opened off the lawn. To one side was a long, wooden building that jutted out over the river where she’d heard spare coffins were kept. To the other side was the morgue. A gate leading to Twenty-Sixth Street stood at the far end. More than a dozen coffins were stacked haphazardly in the corner of the courtyard—some large, some so small only an infant would fit inside.
A bearded man with a checkered cap stood in the courtyard, spraying the icy pavers with a hose. He wore no jacket, despite the air’s misty chill, only a cotton shirt and baggy wool trousers held up by red suspenders. When he saw Una, he turned off the water and set the hose aside.
“Can I help you, miss?”
“Are you the doctor in charge here?”
He shook his head. “The morgue keeper.”
“Yes, perhaps you can help me, then. I came to see a patient—a deceased patient, that is.”
He crossed his arms and leaned against the stack of coffins. “You’re one of them nurses from the school, ain’t ya?”
Una nodded.
“Could tell from your uniform. Rather dour, if you ask me,” he said, then added hastily, “But looks mighty pretty on you.”
“Pretty is not the point. We nurses dress to work, same as you. Now, about that patient.”
“The dead one?”
Una winced. “Yes. Where might I find her . . . er . . . her body?”
“Depends on whether the body’s been claimed yet.” He rapped on the lid of one of the coffins. “After three days, those that ain’t go to potter’s field.”
“She died only last night.”
“Well, then, the body ought to still be inside.” He pushed off from the stack of coffins and gestured to the door of the stone building to her right. “Ladies first.”
The door opened to a long corridor. Una hesitated, then stepped inside. The morgue keeper followed behind her. A strange smell hung in the damp air: the sharp, eye-watering scent of disinfectant and beneath it, the pungent, almost sweet scent of rot. Una shuddered to imagine how the building must reek in the summer months.
The first room they came to had more coffins, their lids not yet nailed down. The morgue keeper lifted the lids one by one for Una to peer inside. A handsome Negro man whose coily hair had just begun to gray. Another man, German by the looks of him, with a dark, gaping bullet hole to his temple. An aged woman with leathery skin and a toothless mouth. A young girl with the dark features of an Italian whose lips were frozen in a peaceful smile. Almost peaceful. Like the others, cords bound her feet and hands as if to keep her tidily contained within the narrow box.
When the keeper lifted the lid off a coffin little bigger than a shoebox, Una had to look away.
“Found frozen in the streets, this one,” the keeper said, seeming to delight in Una’s discomfort. “What kind of unnatural mother—”
“The patient I’m looking for is an adult, not an infant. And she was very much alive when she entered the hospital.” She glared at the keeper until he slid the lid back in place.
Next, they entered the viewing room. Four stone tables stood evenly spaced in front of a large window that looked out onto the street. Morning sunlight streamed in through the glass around curious onlookers. Atop each table lay a body. Rubber sheets covered their nakedness while their clothes hung limply on the wall behind them. A block of wood was wedged beneath each of their necks, lifting their heads and angling their faces for better viewing. Water rained down on them from dangling pipes capped with spray nozzles. It plinked against the rubber sheets and dripped down onto the flagstone floor.
Deidre’s was not among the bodies stretched out here for identification, though Una recognized one of the men killed in yesterday’s accident. His soot-darkened shirt and trousers dangled from a peg behind him. Una couldn’t help but imagine his wife dunking these very clothes in her washbasin only a few days before and hanging them to dry with care so that they didn’t wrinkle. Would she recognize them now, so dirty and tattered?
“What of their clothes if the body goes unclaimed?” Una wondered aloud.
“We keep them for thirty days in case someone recognizes the deceased’s picture outside on the wall,” the keeper answered. “After they’re sent up to the hospital to be washed and handed out to patients in need. Them clothes unfit to wear goes to the Island. Worked up into rag carpet at a factory there, I believe.”
Una nodded, remembering the factory, the smoke, and the steam that belched from its pipes. She’d worked many a day of her stretch there, heedless of whence the rags had come. Now, some small part of her ached at the thought. Her mother’s clothes had been burned beyond all use, the few surviving threads glued to her melted flesh. Blue threads, Una recalled, from her soft gingham day dress. The one with a lace-trimmed collar and modest bustle.
She jogged her head and strode from the room. What would she have done with the dress had something more than threads survived? Turned it into a pillow sham? A pin cushion? How would that have helped Una in the bleak years after? Such foolish sentimentality wouldn’t have mattered then, and it wouldn’t help now, whatever had become of Deidre.
The morgue keeper led her past a storeroom and office to the very back of the building where autopsies were performed. He stopped in the doorway, however, blocking her view.
“This really ain’t the place for a lady,” he said. “I’m not a lady. I’m a nurse.”
He tucked his thumbs beneath the straps of his suspenders and looked down.
“You’ve already shown me a dozen other dead bodies. What’s so different about these?”
“It’s . . . er . . . not the bodies themselves that might offend you. It’s the state of their undress.”
Una tried to step around him, but he blocked her path.
“I assure you, there’s nothing in that room I haven’t seen before.”
He blushed clear to the roots of his beard. Una sighed. Here was a man crass enough to lounge against a stack of coffins, who’d delighted in showing her the curled form of a frozen baby, yet who squirmed at the thought of her seeing a dead man’s private parts.
“Nothing I haven’t seen in my work as a nurse. Now, step aside, please.” “Suit yourself.”
He moved to one side of the jamb, and Una shimmied around him. The other bodies from yesterday’s accident lay on metal-topped trestle tables awaiting examination, water showering down on them. Beside them was another patient, likely from the maternity ward, her stomach swollen and skin ashen. And then, at the far end, Deidre. Her red hair spilled off the table, damp and matted. Her arms lay stiff at her side.
Una stood frozen a moment before forcing down a breath and crossing the room. Her boots clattered atop the wet floor, a haunting intrusion on the silence. She stood beside Deidre and waited for some sign of life—a twitch of the hand or flutter of eyelids. When no sign came, Una reached out and laid her hand on Deidre’s chest. Her skin was cold, her breast unmoving. Una recoiled.
Had she truly expected Deidre to be alive, sleeping soundly amid a room full of corpses? And yet, Una had to fight back the urge to reach out again and shake her as if that might somehow quicken her back to life.
“I take it she’s the one you’re looking for?” the keeper said.
“What happens to her now? Will they really”—Una stopped and swallowed—“cut into her and take out all her organs?”
The keeper sauntered over and shrugged. “If the cause of death ain’t known.”
“A laudanum overdose. That’s what the ward attendant said, anyway.” “Probably not, then.”
“So she’ll go out on display until someone claims her?”
“The hospital will send someone out to notify her kin if any are known.” Una shook her head. “She has no kin.”
“Then she ain’t likely to be claimed, is she?”
Marm Blei might claim her. Someone from the old crew. Surely they wouldn’t let her go missing without checking here. But what about the undertaker’s fees and burial expenses? Who would pay those? Considering
all the profit Marm Blei had made off Deidre’s loot over the years, it seemed only right for her to pay. That didn’t mean she would, though.
“If not, she’ll be buried at potter’s field?”
“Depends.” The keeper wandered his gaze over Deidre’s body the way a thief eyed a diamond ring. “She looks like choice material for one of the medical colleges.”
“What?”
“A certain few of the unclaimed dead are set aside for dissecting. City law and all.”
Una remembered what Dru had said during their first anatomy lecture about the Bone Bill, how to stave off the practice of grave robbing the schools were provided with bodies from among the city’s vagrant, friendless, unclaimed dead. She reached down and smoothed back the strands of wet hair that had fallen across Deidre’s face. It was impossible not to think back on all their escapades together—rowdy nights in the concert saloons, games of euchre by candlelight in their flat. Once, when Marm Blei gained possession of a cache of silk dresses from France, they’d secretly borrowed two of the gowns and passed themselves off as society women at a fancy lunch room on Ladies’ Mile. Of course, they’d snuck out before paying the bill. When Marm Blei found out, she’d taken an extra ten percent of their earnings for three whole months. But the caper had been worth it.
“How much do they throw you on the side?” “I beg your pardon?”
“For choice material. How much do the colleges pay you?”
The keeper tugged on his suspenders again and glanced at the door. “The different colleges allow me something for the loading, carting, and delivering material to them. That’s all. Nothing regular. Just what they see fit to give according to the load. I have to pay the cartman, after all.”
“How much per body?”
“I ain’t never calculated that. They pay me by the load.” “How many bodies per load?”
He shrugged, the soft patter of water filling the silence. “Sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes as many as eight or ten.”
“And how much do they pay you for a load of one?”
“I rarely deliver a single body, unless it’s coming along to springtime, the end of the college term, and—”
Una stepped closer to the man and looked him square in the eye. “How much?”
“A dollar or two.”
“I’ll double that if you promise not to . . . set this one aside.”
“What’s one dead patient or another to you? You know her or something?”
Una looked down at Deidre again. The attendant had been right; her eyes were horribly bloodshot. “No, I don’t know her. But it’s my job to care about my patients, and I don’t want to see this one cut to pieces on some dissecting table while eager students look on.”
“Six.”
“Fine.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out three dollars. “Half now. The rest in three days if she isn’t claimed.” She thrust the money into his open palm. “If you renege, I’ll report you to the city commissioner.”
“Sheesh, you’re a tough nut for a nurse.” He pocketed the money just as the door to the autopsy room opened. Several men walked in, led by a small man with a crooked nose and thick spectacles, whom Una guessed to be the chief pathologist. The others were interns from the hospital, fresh-faced young men she’d seen on occasion, waddling behind the house physician or a visiting surgeon like day-old ducklings. Thank goodness Edwin wasn’t among them.
“What’s going on here, Bartlet?” the crooked-nosed man said to the morgue keeper. “Why is there a woman back here?”
“She’s a nurse, sir. Came to check on a patient.”
The man dropped his chin and eyed Una over the rim of his spectacles. “A patient? There aren’t any patients here. Only dead bodies.”
“I wanted to be sure, sir,” Una said. “Mr. . . . er . . . Bartlet was just about to show me out.”
“Sure?” He snickered and walked to the nearest body. He raised one of the arms and let it drop. It struck the metal table with an echoing bang. Una flinched at the noise but otherwise didn’t move. “Dead enough for you, miss?”
He reminded Una of the thugs she’d had run-ins with in Hell’s Kitchen or the Bend—he was older and better dressed perhaps, but just as mean. Her rule on the streets, number nine, was to put up her fists as if she wasn’t afraid and—when necessary—land the first blow. Though tempting, Una
knew that rule wouldn’t serve her here. She couldn’t afford for word of her visit to get back to Miss Perkins.
“Thank you for your . . . assurances, Doctor,” she said. “I’m quite satisfied and shall leave you to your work.” She cast a final glance at Deidre. With her hair no longer a lion’s mane about her face, Una noticed for the first time a band of discoloration around Deidre’s neck. Peering closer, Una realized it was bruising.
“Doctor, there’s something strange here with this patient—er . . . body.” The pathologist rolled his eyes. A few of the interns chuckled.
“Nurse, I have five bodies to examine in under an hour. I don’t have time for your questions.”
“But I think she might have been strangled.” The idea hadn’t fully formed in Una’s mind until she said the words. But, yes, that was precisely what it appeared to be.
The pathologist came over, shaking his head. Una pointed to the swath of reddish-blue skin around Deidre’s neck. “See this bruising?”
He spared only a moment’s glance at Deidre’s body before turning his narrowed eyes on Una. “That is lividity. Not bruising. Had this woman been strangled, one would see a cluster of small petechiae caused by the assailant’s fingertips.”
“What if he didn’t use his hands?”
The pathologist turned toward the group of interns, jabbing a bony finger in Una’s direction. “This is precisely why women will never be physicians. A little livor mortis, and they get fantastical ideas in their heads about murderers and ghosts who go flitting around the hospital killing patients at will.”
The men laughed.
“I never said anything about ghosts. Only that her neck—”
“The house physician reported to me that this woman died of a laudanum overdose. I see nothing about the body to contradict that. If you have issue with that, take it up with your superintendent. But rest assured, I shall be having a conversation with her as well.”
Una hid her fists in the folds of her skirt. “Forgive my impertinence, Doctor. I have no issue with your studied assessment.”
“Good, then see yourself out.”
