Chapter 42 Vivian
Vivian
February
Rachel has uncovered something about the Knox. She asks Vivian to meet her on Saturday in person at a used bookstore called Turned Pages, near the Old State House. Rachel sends Vivian a series of text emoji teasers: a book, a tombstone, a wink.
This, Vivian thinks, has got to be interesting.
Peter also texts. Can’t wait to see you tonight for dinner, love. Meet me at 6:30 p.m.?
You won’t be too jet-lagged? Vivian snarkily types, then erases. She’ll never know what he was up to if she ignores him. And, if she’s being honest with herself, she can’t wait to be with him again.
Turned Pages is located on the garden level of a historic commercial building on Cornhill Street. She takes the long way to get there, avoiding the area where she thought she saw Peter a couple of days earlier.
In the bookstore window there’s a vintage edition of the medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy and a few faded copies of Hemingway novels. There’s also a Hiring! sign that hangs askew, and Vivian has to swallow the urge she feels to right it.
The door jingles as she enters. It’s one-room store, filled with rows of overstuffed bookshelves and a plain wooden cashier desk. The sweet, musty smell of old books prickles Vivian’s nose, and she feels immediately comforted.
Rachel is already there, standing alongside an elderly gentleman who looks like he comes with the building: a deeply weathered face, bifocals, a muted cardigan sweater the color of too many crayons mixed together.
“Vivian, meet Nicholas, the owner,” Rachel says.
“Hello, Nicholas.” Vivian shakes his trembling hand. “I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never been inside here before. This is just…perfect.”
He smiles. “Hello, Vivian. That’s quite all right. We are a bit of a hidden gem.”
“Nicholas and I have known each other for a long time,” Rachel says. “He often attends our programming at the Vilna Shul. As you can see, he carries a lot of old books. And he has something that I want to show you in a minute. But first—”
She pulls out some papers from her leather satchel and spreads them across the wooden cashier’s desk.
Her eyes shine brightly. “So, you know how you gave me the family tree, right? Well, I searched the city’s vital and town records in the 1800s, and I’ve filled in some of the missing pieces.
Your ‘Dr. No-Good Thurgood’—the one who tried to destroy the schedule of beneficiaries—is Dr. Robert Walter Thurgood.
This here is his death record, from the Massachusetts Vital Records collection, 1820–1902.
” She runs a pink pastel–manicured finger down one of the pages, until it pauses at an entry.
“Impressive, Rachel.”
“Just wait. So, listen, the whole Knox-Thurgood family is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. They have a family plot. I went to see it. William Knox, the Knox founder, is buried there. This Dr. Robert Thurgood is there. Everyone. Everyone except Margaret.”
“Margaret, meaning my ancestor?”
“Correct. Margaret, your great-great-great-grandmother. Mother to the illegitimate child—your great-great-grandmother—and also to this Dr. Thurgood.”
“Was it uncommon at the time for women to be buried in the family plot? Maybe she—”
“No,” Rachel interrupts. “Women—wives, daughters—they were buried in either common plots, or for wealthy families, usually in the dedicated family plot. This Knox/Thurgood family plot has several generations in it. It’s a very male-dominated lineage, son producing son producing son, but the women—the wives—are buried there. Not Margaret, though.”
“So where is she?”
“Do you remember that note that we found from the servant who said, ‘Something is not right. He has her body in the basement’?”
“How could I forget?”
“Well, Dr. Thurgood was a physician who, according to my research, was very interested in pathology, which meant plenty of autopsies. He was a student and then a professor at Harvard Medical School, so I found records of his research. Bodies were hard to come by in the 1800s, so there was apparently a whole illicit body-snatching, grave-robbing ring going on—”
“Really?” Vivian interrupts, disdain on her face.
“Really. Medical students needed cadavers for anatomical study, after all, so I guess they had to come by them somehow. At Harvard, they even formed their own secret society around it back in the day, called the Spunker Club.”
Vivian crinkles her nose. “What is it with secret societies?”
“Well, I guess they wouldn’t need to be secret if they were squeaky clean.”
“True.”
“Anyway, back to our Dr. Thurgood. So he had his home office in the basement of the Knox….”
Vivian swallows. “You mean…”
Rachel nods. “It’s likely he was performing autopsies on stolen cadavers down there.”
Vivian stares at her friend. “What are you saying? And what does this have to do with Margaret? Do you think he autopsied his own mother?” She shudders, while Nicholas shakes his head in disbelief.
“Well, what else could that letter mean?”
“That’s…I don’t even know what to say.”
“I know. Pretty horrific, if it’s true. I just think there’s got to be a reason that Margaret isn’t buried in the family plot, right?” Rachel says.
“Wouldn’t he still have buried her, after the autopsy? Wait…you think she’s buried in the Knox itself?”
“I don’t think that. Well, I don’t really know, to be honest. She’s buried somewhere. Let’s just hope it’s an unmarked plot in this Mount Auburn Cemetery.”
“Oh my God, Rachel. What kind of person was this man?”
“A bad writer,” Nicholas intervenes. He produces a book: Selected Poems, written by Edgar Rolo Butterworth.
Vivian frowns. “Wait, where do I know this name?”
“Remember at your mom’s house, that terrible book of poetry that we found the letters in? Musings on Love and Life, or something like that? Well, that was also written by this Edgar Rolo Butterworth—or should I say Dr. Thurgood.”
Vivian blinks, not totally understanding.
“Edgar Rolo Butterworth is an anagram of Robert Walter Thurgood. It’s his pseudonym. They are the same person,” Nicholas says rather matter-of-factly.
“What? Christ.”
“One of your ancestors must have known, which is why they put the letters in that book,” says Rachel.
“How did you figure this out?”
Rachel riffles through her papers to retrieve a printout of a tombstone. “This is the epigraph on Dr. Thurgood’s tombstone.”
Judge me not today
But for eternity.
In death the truth shall be.
—E. R. Butterworth
“Hidden in plain sight,” Rachel says. “When I saw this quote, I remembered the book of poetry at your mom’s house.
And then I reached out to Nicholas, who had this book in his store.
As you might guess, it’s another poorly written poetry collection—I guess Butterworth had a knack for that. Anyway, want to show her, Nicholas?”
He nods, carefully opening the book and pointing to the inside left flap, at a stamped image: a ghastly skull head with smoke billowing from its eyes, over the words “Ex Libris Robert Walter Thurgood.”
Goose bumps prickle across Vivian’s skin.
“The library of Robert Walter Thurgood,” Nicholas says.
“It’s a bookplate, to indicate ownership.
People back in the day took pride in their personal library collections and marked their books with custom stamps.
In this case, it’s more than that. Robert is giving us a clue that he is both the owner of the book and the author. ”
Rachel jumps in. “Given the two instances of Butterworth and Thurgood being linked—the tombstone and the bookplate—we realized it had to be more than coincidence. Also I researched Butterworth, and he doesn’t exist.”
“This is wild.” Vivian looks back and forth between the tombstone printout and the book.
“Dr. Robert Walter Thurgood also published some medical books under his real name,” Nicholas says. “I don’t have them, but I could get them, if that would be of interest.”
“Thank you, Nicholas,” Rachel says.
“Perhaps unsurprisingly, his medical books appear to be on pathology.”
“I get why people—writers—use pseudonyms,” Vivian says. “But something doesn’t make sense to me. If Dr. Thurgood wanted anonymity as a poet, then why risk discovery by putting this quote on his tombstone?”
Rachel taps her fingers against the counter, almost impatiently.
“For the same reason that serial killers write letters to the public or leave their ‘signatures’ at crime scenes. Dr. Thurgood wanted to be discovered eventually. He was leaving a trail so someone—like us—could connect the dots: that the doctor was the poet.”
“But why? What was he doing? What was his ‘crime scene,’ so to speak?”
Rachel exhales. “I don’t know. But I think it involved your ancestor and pathology. Those are the dots he’s given us to connect. And whatever it was, it seems he wanted to be lauded for it, after his death. ‘Judge me not for today but for eternity.’ ”
Vivian shakes her head, trying to erase the unfortunate skeletal images that have now taken hold. She becomes hyperaware of her own body, a chill slowly traveling down each subsequent, isolated vertebra.