Chapter 19 #2
Poor Professor Currier valiantly tried to hide her distress, but clearly the ordeal was already taking its toll.
And so rather than let the woman collapse to the floor, Marigold decided upon logical expediency.
She followed the clerk through the swinging doors to find him, and now a second attendant she recognized as the younger of the two men who came to the college, engaged in a pleasurable smoke before they stirred themselves to the business at hand.
“Excuse me, please, but—”
“You’re supposed to wait,” the older clerk protested.
“You were supposed to inform the coroner that we were here,” Marigold countered.
“You’ve got some nerve,” he sniped.
“I have,” she answered with her crocodile smile.
She was quite done with putting up with mediocre men.
“We are ready to proceed,” Marigold informed them, moving purposely to the table where the subject of their visit lay, easily recognizable by her Titian hair peeking out from underneath the enveloping white sheet.
The clerk immediately disappeared through another set of swinging doors and returned with a serious-looking young doctor—identified as such by his long white coat over his pressed shirtfront and tie.
“I am sorry to have kept you ladies waiting.” He adjusted his spectacles. “My apologies. We don’t usually get women on their own here.”
“Do you not?” Dr. Barker seemed to have absorbed some of Marigold’s mood. “Because here we are.”
The young doctor, who was perhaps not used to sarcasm, and so did not recognize it, continued earnestly. “I expect most women would find it distressful in the extreme to identify—”
“Nonsense. I expect,” Dr. Barker continued with only slightly less patience, “you will not have yet recognized that my name and signature were the ones at the bottom of the preliminary report made at the scene of death. Dr. Emilie Barker, how do you do. I am the resident physician at Wellesley College, responsible for the health and welfare of over seven hundred young women under my care. I performed the preliminary examination of the body on the day this young woman was discovered in Lake Waban.” She put out her hand as an equal—if not superior. “And you are?”
“Dr. Wallace Prescott. I am very pleased to meet you, ma’am.” He shook her hand with alacrity. “I should have realized. Your reputation precedes you, Dr. Barker.”
“Thank you, Dr. Prescott. May I introduce you to Professor Imogen Currier and Miss Marigold Manners.” She indicated them in turn.
“And now that introductions are complete, let us get on with the identification, if you please.” She paused, as she had in the carriage, to address her colleague.
“Dr. Prescott is going to turn back the cover over her in a moment, Imogen, but I want you to remember what Marigold said earlier—she is beyond care and beyond pain.”
“Yes.” Professor Currier nodded her understanding. “Thank you.”
Dr. Barker signaled to young Dr. Prescott, who very methodically drew back the cover to reveal the face that had hung like a painting in the walls of Marigold’s memory.
“This is the girl I pulled out of Lake Waban,” she said.
Professor Currier drew her handkerchief to cover her mouth.
“I am sorry this is distressing for you, ladies,” the coroner began, before a pointed look from Dr. Barker caused him to switch his approach. “Do you recognize anything that might—”
“Yes. Yes, I recognize her.” Professor Currier stiffened her spine and lowered her handkerchief.
“She is Miss Olivia Thayer, daughter of the Reverend and Mrs. Thayer of Wellesley. They live—she lived in Wellesley. The town, not the college,” Professor Currier clarified.
“Blossom Street. She was seventeen years old.”
“You are sure,” the coroner asked as he carefully took that information down, “beyond any reasonable doubt?”
Professor Currier swallowed again before she spoke carefully. “I am.”
The coroner pulled the sheet back up over the body. “Thank you for coming in.”
If the coroner was done with them, Dr. Barker was not done with him. “Official cause of death, doctor?”
The coroner nodded but frowned, glancing at Professor Currier. “Perhaps, Dr. Barker, you and I might meet privately to discuss the findings of the autops—”
“No, please.” Professor Currier rallied again. “I think it would behoove us all to hear the facts—the unvarnished truth, doctor.”
Marigold could only agree with her—enough time and energy had been wasted on discretion. “Perhaps a chair?”
“Yes, certainly, please come into my office.” Dr. Prescott led them to a small, functional room with a utilitarian desk, two straight-backed chairs and a solid wall of oaken filing cabinets.
“Please make yourselves comfortable,” he said even as his apologetic tone recognized the futility of the offer.
“I’ll stand,” Marigold volunteered, as the two older women took their uncomfortable places.
“Now, as to your question—” Dr. Prescott consulted his findings. “Although it was difficult to ascertain, due to prolonged exposure to the cold water, which we estimate to have been approximately twenty hours, the time of death has been established as seven PM on Sunday, October seventh.”
The very day Marigold had arrived at College Hall. The evening she had been rejoicing that she had found her way back to her sanctuary of learning.
The college had proved no sanctuary for Olivia Thayer.
“Cause of death?” Dr. Barker asked succinctly.
The corner swallowed. “I was asked for discretion regarding …”
“Perhaps with the public, Dr. Prescott. And certainly, with the press. But I hope you will understand that whatever you choose to release to the press or the public, I have all the information from my preliminary report to take into account in my very real responsibility for the welfare of over seven hundred young persons under my care.” Dr. Barker’s patience was deep but not unlimited.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Doctor,” she corrected without rancor. “And you understand that sharing your findings with the investigating authorities will be critical to the prosecution of whoever murdered this girl, do you not? And will also help prevent other girls, similar to this unfortunate one, from sharing a similar fate at the same hands?”
“Oh, I see. Yes, doctor. It was strangulation.” Dr. Prescott swallowed around the word before he clarified. “Manual strangulation, that is, by hand, not a garrote or ligature.”
“And was her hyoid bone fractured?” Dr. Barker pressed.
Dr. Prescott hesitated, frowning down at his paperwork before glancing at Professor Currier as if to ascertain her state of mind before he answered.
Dr. Barker helped him along. “I observed the livid bruising and scratches on the neck signifying strangulation, as well as petechiae in and around the eyes. But I could not confirm whether the young woman’s hyoid bone was fractured, which is the typical result in a good three quarters of all strangulation cases.
And consistent with a much larger, stronger individual performing the strangulation.
So I hope that your postmortem examination has made a definitive finding? ”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Doctor.” Dr. Barker’s voice would brook no further disrespect, even if it was clearly unintentional. “So was her hyoid bone crushed or was it not?”
The young doctor seemed to overcome—or discover—his scruples. “Yes, Dr. Barker, it was.”
“And the size of the hand marks, doctor?”
“The extant bruises, as you so keenly observed, are consistent with a male perpetrator. That is,” he began to clarify for Marigold and Professor Currier’s benefit, “the size suggests the crime was done by a male of slightly over-average size. Or perhaps an extraordinarily large-sized, strong woman.”
Which quite definitively was not Professor Currier—the tiny, nearly fragile professor seemed physically incapable of something requiring such strength. As it was, she could barely sit—she slumped back in her chair in obvious distress.
Marigold’s mind ran back to tall, conveniently athletic Sarah Appleton, with her strong rower’s hands and penchant for picking fights and holding grudges. Was she of “over-average size”?
“And the other bruises, on both wrists,” Dr. Prescott went on, “suggest forced constraint, which, along with the evidence of tearing on the victim’s clothing, suggests a physical struggle.
But I did find something more—one distinguishing mark,” Dr. Prescott added.
“A darker contusion occurring on the left side of the victim’s neck, observed as part of the fourth finger of the handprint.
I would put this down to a large ring—I am thinking a man’s signet ring—worn on the fourth finger. ”
And that put paid to elegant Sarah Appleton with her long, articulate, decidedly ring-less fingers.
Not that Marigold had ever had any real evidence against the girl.
Despite her own instruction not to let her personal antipathy for her distant cousin color her thinking, Marigold had done just that.
Clearly, it was time to stop thinking about the rivalries of women and place the blame squarely on men. Where it perhaps should have been along.