The Post-Mortem Picture Deck (Ch22)
Theda prepares to leave for Philadelphia but finds a trace of the last resident of their house who has been missing for months...
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“Oh, Ishmael, you have nothing on me, do you? I can tie a knot just as well as any sailor.” She tied the last knot on her homemade pistol holster.
She spoke softly to herself, the soothing words forming a mental guard against the avalanche of thoughts that pushed against her psyche, demanding attention. The events of the day tumbled like laundry out of a basket: the strange and idiotic meeting with Mr. Conlin, Van Horn’s furious and devastated father, and being alone in the car with Private Jackson. Thoughts of Private Jackson were almost winning when she started her random mantra to send them to the far reaches of her mind, never to be referenced again. She was leaving forever tomorrow. She’d never see him again. Which was good, really.
Then why can’t you just forget him?
She tossed the thought away. “It’s not down on my map. True places never are,” she quoted, remembering more of Moby Dick and surveying her work. “This is a true place? Men die in the street here, and their companions follow me with magical stories from the future.”
Theda had waited at her closed bedroom door, her mother and sister chattering away while packing for their morning trip to Philadelphia. “We need to be ready at eight o’clock sharp!” Margaret had called and she answered in the affirmative, hoping that when her words filtered under the door that the forced cheerfulness would sound natural. When Violet and her mother finally called good-night, she set to work.
Every beat of her heart knocked against her chest painfully and it had been like that ever since leaving the General Building with Jackson. Her father had phoned earlier saying he would be quite late, and the women were alone. Theda strained to hear his approaching vehicle but any outside noise was obscured by a chorus of a million withered stalks riled by the wind.
After she was sure her mother and sister slept, set about her work of tying together two sets of cashmere stockings to make both a sling and a knotted holster for the tiny Colt pistol. She fashioned it after the arm slings they taught her to make when rolling bandages for the Red Cross.
She turned the makeshift holster over and the gun tumbled to the bed.
“Damnit.” She untied the knots, pulling too hard in her frustration and started over. The bullets were at her foot where she sat cross-legged on the bed, loose hair over one shoulder, looking like a maiden tying macramé. The small kerosene lamp ran red highlights in tiny waves through her hair. “What do you think of this, Maxim?” Talking quietly out loud kept the thoughts on her work instead of the thousand mind alleys they could run down. “You told me this gun was too small. Too weak, you told me. You should have seen what I saw today. Looks like you’re going to get into a lot of trouble. Bad trouble.”
She wiggled her toes, the bullets shifting like Mexican jumping beans. When she was finished she tied the holster over her shoulder with the gun resting against her left ribcage, making it difficult to breathe, but that was a minor sacrifice. She shimmied, but the gun stayed put. Tomorrow she would strap the gun over her blouse and cover it with her belted traveling suit jacket. She rose from the bed, still wearing the gun, and opened the closet door where tomorrow’s suit hung. She donned the jacket over her nightgown and belted it under the gun. There was a tiny bulge on her left side but if she kept her purse there no one would notice.
The real problem was drawing it, and doing it quickly if, heaven forbid, trouble found her before she got out of Fort Riley. She practiced unbuttoning the top two buttons as fast with her left hand while her right reached in and pulled the gun loose. Clumsy, but it would have to do.
She carefully removed the holster from her body and placed it on the bed next to the bullets. She plucked the small kerosene lamp from the table and her shadow mimicked her on the opposite wall. She peered into the open closet. It was poorly constructed: the door opened to a shallow space that ran almost ten feet to the left, forming a storage area for clothing, but difficult for anyone to see all the contents of the closet. She’d hide the gun and equipment here. The Evora ladies never get out of town without chaos. No one’s going to look in this closet.
She gathered everything and hunched over, scooted to the back of the closet, the heavy scent of cedar like a whiff of forest. She placed the items on the floor and was about to back out when she noticed a white paper stuck behind a loose cedar board. The edge was frayed, as if a mouse had given it a chew. She pinched the top corner and pulled it loose, causing a little burst of paper snowflakes to fall to the closet floor. She backed out of the closet and sat on the bed.
She held a large envelope, similar to the one that awful Mr. Conlin had shown her that afternoon. She ran her finger over the address on the first one. The envelope was addressed to Dr Mark Collins and a moment later she recognized the address. It’s here. This house. It was dated August 22nd, 1917. She shook the contents onto her lap and gasped.
The first picture in the stack of photographs was of a dead man lying on a bed. His vacant eyes stared at a point behind the camera, the soul absent. Autopsy photography? She had seen enough of those while working with her father, and had even been present when photographers visually recorded the step-by-step procedures that Dr. Evora conducted on a body, the photographs intended for future medical textbooks. Those photographers generally tried to not show the face of the cadaver, out of respect for the life that ended so others could chop him to bits and peer at his organs.
This man looked to be about nineteen- or twenty-years old. He lay on a hospital bed with a headboard of vertical bars, identical to the ones lining the long room of the Infirmary. His body was slender and his arms, which lay by his side, were long with lean muscle; a working man’s build. A sheet covered his lower half exposing his bare chest, the ribs protruding over his sunken stomach. The skin around his mouth and nose was black in the sepia photo, as if an ink well had been tipped over his nose. What is that? She ran her finger around the man’s face.
There were more, all of different dead men, all with the same dark marks about their faces, all in the same position.
She placed the photos aside with uneasy feeling of both wanting to continue to study and not touch them any longer. She slid the letter out of the envelope.
Dear Mark,
Thank you for the camera. Giving me such an expensive piece of equipment for the mere favor of developing your photographs is quite an unbalanced payment, but if you are insistent, then I accept your generous gift.
These post-mortems disturb me. In all my years as a physician, I’ve never seen such dark facial marks on a bedridden patient. Cyanosis? I’ve only seen worse in drownings.
I have written the names on the back of each photo following your list. Please review my accuracy. A second set of prints is safe in my office, as per your request.
Mark, although your letter is short, it is quite cryptic. I attribute it to fatigue and overwork, a state both of us are used to as physicians! But I sense something is amiss. I am here if you need to bend an ear. Those facial marks are interesting. I’d be curious to know your conclusion, when you have the time. We just installed a telephone at the house.
Sincerely,
Walter
Dr. Mark Collins. For a moment, the name was meaningless. Then she remembered.
Has to be that doctor, the one who took off one day. Father said he may have run off with a pretty nurse. A detective was here, wanting to search the house.
She turned the photographs over one by one and read the names written in faint pencil. William Carson. Curtis Bunkerhoff. Matthew Armstrong, Henry Van Sickle. She placed them gently aside again and picked up the second envelope.
August 22nd, 1917 was just two weeks before Dr. Harold Evora had left for Kansas.
She peered at the first photograph, turning it to the lamplight. The curve of a lamp was in the left corner, casting the shadows to rightward. She flipped through the photographs and yes, that light was in all of them, in exactly the same place. It was the same bed. They were in the same bed, but not at the same time.
The facial marks. Frostbite. There had been a feverish interest in frostbite after the miraculous return of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic voyage. No man had lost his life, but many of them had lost pieces of themselves.
Frostbite from a hospital bed? That was absurd. But what if they were outside, in the dead of winter? Kansas winters were cruel. Caleb Van Horn had been outside for one night and it landed him in the Infirmary, and it was March. Had a man been outside all night during a terribly long night in January, frostbite wasn’t out of the question. But several men, with the same markings on their face? Frostbite would have to be incredible to replicate like that. Almost with a mind of its own.
She studied one of the photos, the one of Henry Van Sickle. His arms were at his sides, just as with the other men. Then, something caught her eye and she leaned toward the light and brought the photograph closer to her face.
There were marks around the wrists. Marks as if at one time, something tight had been tied around his wrists.
She shuffled the other photos. Not all of their hands were visible, but on two of the other men, the same marks were present.
She sat back, completely befuddled. What killed these men? Besides frostbite and drowning, as the letter suggested, she could think of nothing that explained that odd facial discoloring.
Then something else came to her.
Van Horn.
Van Sickle.
Before she could form a full thought, the house rattled, and the front door slowly opened and shut with deliberateness and caution, taking into account the time of night. She had not heard a car over the howling of the wind.
She gathered the photographs and letter and slid them back into the envelope and padded barefoot out the bedroom door.
Her father was home.
FELICES ALISON BULL LIKED
FELICES ALISON TOROALISON Y HISTORICAL