Let the Dead Keep Their Secrets Page 8

  “Do you have a preference for how Mrs. Anderson will be posed?” Monroe asked.

  “My husband would like his mother to be seated in her favorite chair, with an open book on her lap. She was a great one for reading. It was a terrible burden to her when her eyes gave out.”

  “Of course. We like to remember our loved ones as they once were, and that includes treasured pastimes.”

  “The wedding photograph that was taken of my husband’s parents no longer exists, so this will be the only memento we have.”

  “I understand.”

  The house was large and expensively furnished. Dark ancestral oils hung from the walls and Turkish carpets covered the floors. Every corner had its plant, Oriental vase, or Greek bust. The staircase leading to the second floor curved gracefully upward from the marble-tiled foyer, an elaborately carved banister gleaming with polish. All of the drapes had been drawn in deference to the death; gas lamps illuminated the upstairs hallway.

  “I’ll leave you here,” Thalia Anderson said, opening the door to her mother-in-law’s bedroom.

  An older woman dressed in black with a housekeeper’s chatelaine around her waist rose from the chair where she had been keeping watch beside the body. She passed them with a nod of acknowledgment, joining the younger Mrs. Anderson in the corridor. Felicia Monroe closed the door, then listened as two sets of footsteps moved away and descended the staircase.

  The room was cold. Both windows had been opened six inches from the bottom sash; the damp chill of late February penetrated into every corner.

  Bartholomew Monroe closed the windows and turned on the gas fire in the grate. The body would stiffen faster in the heat, but they’d work quickly. No sense catching pneumonia when they’d already missed the most important moment of the passing. No photographer had yet managed to capture that precious exhalation of soul everyone knew had to be there; the few claimants to that discovery had proved to be charlatans.

  Pauline Anderson’s favorite chair stood before the fireplace, an embroidered ottoman nearby for toasting cold feet. The book she was to hold lay atop a crocheted shawl.

  Felicia took a small hand mirror from one of the cases and held it close to the dead woman’s mouth, watching carefully for any clouding of the reflection. She had been surprised and frightened the first time a corpse breathed. Bartholomew had solved the problem without any fuss, though the photograph he took at that moment showed no sign of a soul escaping in a cloud of transparent plasma. A great disappointment, but the deceased had been so freshly gone that the rest of the photographs almost made up for it. The result had been one of Bartholomew’s most lifelike set of cabinet photos, a great comfort to the family and the first of the enlarged images to be hung in a gallery now famous throughout the city.

  “We’ll leave the chair where it is,” he said, standing back with hands cupped around his eyes to imitate the shutter’s field of view. “Just turn it around a bit to catch more of the light from the window. Good, that’s it. And we’ll position a drape behind to remove the distraction of the rest of the room. It will look as though she’s come into the studio for a live portrait.”

  “What about the eyes?”

  “In this case, since she’s supposed to be reading, we’ll leave the lids alone and tilt the head downward and to the side a bit. Taken slightly from above, the face will look less wrinkled, and therefore a bit younger. If necessary, we can retouch later, but I think that will do nicely.”

  Mrs. Anderson, a small woman in life, was birdlike in death. Bartholomew Monroe gathered her into his arms and settled her into the chair in which she had spent many comfortable hours. “She’s gone off a bit,” he remarked, taking a camphorated sweet wrapped in a twist of paper from a snuffbox he carried in his vest pocket. The strong odor of the camphor quickly spread throughout the small bedroom.

  Felicia crunched a sugary camphor ball between her teeth, taking a deep breath as the fumes spread into her nostrils and down the back of her throat. Then she bent over Pauline Anderson, arranging the folds of her gown, smoothing the long sleeves over her shriveled hands, propping the book where it would lie open in the dead woman’s lap, exactly as if she were so absorbed by its pages that she hadn’t noticed a photographer capturing her likeness.

  “I think a bit of liquid powder will help, and perhaps some Rowland’s Macassar Oil on the lips.” Felicia busied herself applying a thin coating of face powder mixed with alcohol over Mrs. Anderson’s age-splotched skin, shining her lips with the same product men used to slick down their hair. Nothing else looked as natural, gave quite the right sheen. She combed a few stray wisps of hair into place and settled the lace cap to hide the near baldness of the skull. The last touch was a pair of jet earrings left on the dresser to be screwed into Pauline Anderson’s ears.

  “She’s ready,” Felicia announced, standing back to view her creation.

  “The family will be very happy with this,” Bartholomew said. He disappeared under the black cloth draping both him and his camera, muttering to himself as he inserted the glass slide, composed the shot he meant to take, focused, and calculated the exposure time. Every detail of the scene before him would be captured in startling clarity. He was an artist who would take as much time perfecting the final print as he had the design of its negative.

  For the five minutes he deemed necessary to obtain a perfect representation of reality, neither of the Monroes moved or spoke. Felicia had long ago decided that during the slow process of securing a life image on glass, her brother was akin to a priest performing the miracle of transubstantiation. Or perhaps a shaman entering the trance state of divination. Whatever or whoever he became, the transformation never failed to mesmerize her.

  “Will you take other shots?” she asked when he had packed three glass plates into their holding cases.

  “I don’t see any point to it.”

  Occasionally, if the deceased was unusually beautiful or ugly, he took extra photographs for the private collection over which he pored for hours, looking for a clue to the mysterious chasm separating life from death. But this face was old and ordinary. It didn’t matter whether she might have been lovely in her youth; Bartholomew was only interested in seizing a likeness of what he believed escaped into empty air at the moment of passing. It would be a ghostlike image, a cloud of swirling vapor, with perhaps at its center a light like the flame of a candle. The departure of a soul was reputed to happen in an instant, but no one knew for certain. No one had been able to prove he’d seen it happen. That’s where the promise of photography came in.

  Monroe lifted Mrs. Anderson from her reading chair and laid her on the bed. Felicia folded the hands and straightened the lace widow’s cap again, removed the shawl and placed it with the book at the foot of the bed. “She’s stiffening,” she reported, slapping gently on the corpse’s cheeks to shape the lips into what would pass for the smile of a Christian woman gone happily to meet her Maker.

  “We’re finished.” He turned off the gas and opened the windows again. Some of the camphor smell drifted out of the room, replaced by the familiar odor of ripe horse dung piled against the curb.

  When they had repacked all of the equipment into the boxes, the Monroes left Pauline Anderson in peace. The same footman who had carried the cases upstairs was summoned to bring them down again.

  “My mother-in-law will be viewed in the parlor tomorrow,” Mrs. Anderson said as she showed them out. “Will you be able to supply cartes de visite and cabinet photographs by then?”

  “You shall have them tomorrow morning,” promised Bartholomew. “I’ll have my clerk deliver them.”

  “I think fifty of the cartes de visite for friends and acquaintances and a dozen cabinet photographs for family,” Mrs. Anderson decided. “If my husband should want more, we’ll send word to you.”

  “Once again, our deepest condolences.” Bartholomew bent over her hand, but did not brush it with his lips.

  As the door to the Anderson mansion closed behind th
em, the Monroes saw a mortuary wagon turn into the alleyway. The coffin had arrived.

  CHAPTER 9

  The first thing Jacob Riis did after the package arrived was lock the door. Reporters were a curious and talkative bunch, in and out of each other’s offices all day chasing rumors, racing up and down the stairs to find a story, place a bet, or haul in buckets of beer. The story Hunter and MacKenzie were paying Riis to follow might turn out to be nothing, but he wasn’t about to take any chances. He’d have to keep his mouth shut and his typewriter silent until Geoffrey Hunter gave him the okay, but if what their client suspected proved to be true, Riis would be the first to break the news. New Yorkers loved to read about spouses killing one another.

  He unwrapped the glass negatives and slid them out of their protective wooden frames. You could tell a lot from a preliminary inspection, but you had to know what to look for.

  Miss MacKenzie had done a good job. Four glass plates stolen and four exposed blanks substituted. Riis had had to lay odds that he and Monroe were using plates from the same photographic supplier, but since most of the photographers in New York City did business there, the risk had paid off.

  Every busy photographer had unprintable negatives in his files, and most of them would have sworn that the negatives had been properly developed and handled and were perfectly fine when they were put away. Since no artist wanted to blame himself for failure, it had to be the fault of the company producing the new dry plates that had made their lives so much easier. With every technological advance, they reasoned, there had to be a period of trial and error. He hoped Bartholomew Monroe subscribed to that theory.

  Only one of the glass negatives Prudence MacKenzie had taken bore unmistakable evidence of retouching, the one from which the cabinet photograph had been printed. Examined under the strongest light Riis could manage in his cramped office, it became obvious how the negative had been altered. It was a commonly used method that was both cheap and durable. Varnish was brushed over the glass, sometimes several coats, both to preserve the negative and to provide a surface on which the changes could be made. Facial wrinkles were smoothed out, unwanted backgrounds disappeared, sometimes a pet was added. Anything the photographer could dream up that he or the artist he hired could draw, paint, or etch into the fixative.

  If the coat of varnish was thick enough, it was possible to scrape away at it with delicate persistence until tiny flakes danced off the glass. The trick was not to harm the original negative. Before he set to work on the plate, Riis pulled several prints, ensuring that he would have an accurate record of what the negative produced prior to whatever changes he effected. The enlargements he printed were clear, the contrast between light and dark more heightened than in the cabinet photograph Claire had given Geoffrey Hunter. Whoever had painted the whites of Catherine and Ingrid Sorensen’s eyes had used the finest of tiny brushes; it was almost impossible to detect the hairlike strokes.

  Riis used an ebony-handled medical scalpel to scratch gently at the varnish over Catherine Sorensen’s eyes. He didn’t dare apply heat, but he breathed moisture onto the surface of the plate as he moved the sharp blade back and forth, barely grazing the varnish with each pass. Infinitesimal bits loosened themselves and were sloughed off. Slowly, slowly, until finally he thought he had entirely cleared the whites of the subject’s eyes.

  His back ached from bending over; the fingers holding the scalpel had cramped. He stood for a moment stretching and rubbing his hands together, then hurried into the darkroom.

  When he came out for the last time, holding one wet print by a corner, Riis was more puzzled than pleased. Four other prints hung on the drying line, each one developed with varying degrees of contrast. He could pull as many as he wanted from that single negative, could change the ratio between light and dark, do away entirely with shadows, but nothing would change the basic fact that there didn’t appear to be any reason for the photographer to have painted over the whites of Catherine Sorensen’s eyes.

  Unless Riis was so tired that he had missed it.

  He laid the print on a sheet of absorbent white paper, then went to the minuscule gas stove, where he brewed coffee to keep himself awake when he photographed the tenements at night. He had been so sure he would find spider threads of petechiae in the dead woman’s eyes that despite the evidence of his own work, he was having a hard time believing they weren’t there. He took off his glasses and rubbed his face. Lit the gas burner beneath the pot of coffee he had boiled several hours ago, and drank a cup of the vile-tasting liquid as quickly as he could without burning his mouth. He was missing something. He knew he was. He would start over, and this time he would find what he knew had to be there.

  The print he had laid on the white paper was still damp. He put another sheet of paper on top of it and pressed lightly but firmly. He was about to go back to the darkroom when he glanced at the enlarger where he, Miss MacKenzie, and Mr. Hunter had studied the cabinet photo. He hadn’t seen petechiae with his naked eye or with the magnifying glass he kept near his developing tanks, but this new enlarger he had bought with the money he made freelancing had one of the most powerful lenses you could obtain. It couldn’t imagine something that wasn’t there, the way the human brain could. If there was even a single burst capillary in one of Catherine Sorensen’s eyes, the lens would find it. It made a human hair look like a thick shaft of Oriental bamboo.

  At first, Riis saw nothing but faint traces of the varnish he had scraped off, but as he turned the focus knob, it was as if he were plunging past what lay on the surface, through the glass onto the eye itself. And there they were. Not like a web, as he had pictured them, but a spray of infinitesimally small red pinpoints. He had looked right past them, searching so intently for the kind of damage he had seen in the violent deaths he had photographed for the police that he had not allowed for what might happen in a slower, more gentle murder. If there were such a thing.

  Now that he knew what to hunt for, he could locate the petechiae easily; the evidence of strangulation or suffocation was too plain to be anything else.

  Riis took the other three glass negatives into the darkroom, confident he was about to provide the keys that would unlock the mystery of how Claire Buchanan’s sister and niece had died.

  * * *

  By Monday, when he took them to the Hunter and MacKenzie office, Riis had made five prints of each of the four glass negatives Prudence had filched from Bartholomew Monroe’s studio. From past experience dealing with police detectives, he knew how often a photograph was defaced by notations scrawled across its surface with grease pencils. Arrows, circles, and exclamation points were their favorite symbols. He assumed that Geoffrey Hunter’s background as a Pinkerton would have taught him the same destructive habits.

  “Let’s start with the cabinet photograph.” Riis laid the copies on the Hunter and MacKenzie conference table. Josiah Gregory, notebook and sharpened pencil in hand, joined them.

  “What you’re looking for are almost microscopically small dots on the surface of the eyes,” he explained. “I’m going on the assumption that a pillow was used to suffocate them, that the baby was too recently born to struggle and the mother too weak from childbirth to be able to fend off her killer.”

  “We don’t have any proof of that,” Geoffrey said, always pragmatic and skeptical.

  “That’s what I think I can give you,” Riis replied. “If not proof that will stand up in court, at least enough substantiation of what Miss Buchanan claims to justify continuing with the case.”

  “That’s all we need at this point,” Prudence said. Whether they had two cases or one was a point of contention she and Geoffrey hadn’t yet resolved. Their client was convinced that Lucinda Pallazzo’s death was entirely separate from whatever had happened to her sister. Geoffrey argued that murderers often committed multiple crimes to conceal their first killing.

  “The retouching was done by painting over a layer of varnish that protected the glass plate negative. It’s somet
hing photographers do all the time. When chemical baths were less stable than they are now, varnish was a way of protecting the negative from deterioration,” Riis explained. “What I did was scale off the coating very carefully until I got down to the glass surface. Then I reprinted. The photographs you’re holding now are the result.”

  With the magnifying glass Josiah Gregory provided, Prudence studied the prints, searching determinedly for the tiny pinpoints of broken capillaries Riis claimed to have found.

  “Geoffrey, take a look at this and tell me your opinion,” she said, handing him her magnifying glass and the photograph she had been examining. “I think I see what Mr. Riis described, but I have another concern. Is the Compton’s Medical Guide still in your office?”

  “In the bookcase behind my desk.”

  “This is what I thought I remembered,” Prudence said, a forefinger keeping her place in the medical book she brought back from Geoffrey’s office. She opened it on the table and tapped the pertinent page with an impatient fingernail. “I looked up petechiae after Mr. Riis told us about them and showed us the police photographs. They can occur anywhere on the skin or inside the mouth or nose, as well as in the eyes, whenever there’s pressure on the capillaries. The author specifically cites the great strain associated with birthing a child. So if a labor is long or difficult, it’s very likely the mother will experience the kind of damage associated with great effort or even violence. That’s one of the reasons some new mothers are reluctant to see anyone but family members. The petechiae can look like one of those terrible rashes one associates with poison ivy.”

  “So even after our foray into that ghoulish gallery, we still can’t prove anything?” Josiah asked.

  “What Miss MacKenzie says about the mother is true,” Riis said, “but it’s not an explanation of why a newborn would have damaged eyes.”

  He took a second sheaf of photographs out of his satchel and handed them around.