Free Louisa and the Missing Heiress by Anna Maclean Page A

live. No one could forget her trials on the gorgeous chestnut pony she had received for her tenth birthday—and avidly shared with all of us, her friends. The pony was a beauty with a horrid disposition; it bit, stood its ground, and whenever Dot gained her rightful place in the saddle, without so much as a by-your-leave the pony would buckle and throw her to the ground. Eventually even Mrs. Brownly put her foot down and insisted the pony be returned, but Dot, more stubborn, cried for days. She hated to give up.
    At the postmortem, though, I looked down upon Dot’s bruised, naked, lifeless body and realized that this was the final insult to whatever injury had quenched that fine spirit. Even her modesty had been annihilated.
    Death was a destroyer, and Dot’s virtues had been destroyed along with the rest of her.
    Roder was beginning to lift organs out of the opened cavity of Dorothy’s body.
    “Louy,” Sylvia pleaded. She had turned pale green.
    “We must get you into the air,” I said, helping her from her seat. “We have seen enough here. Too much for you, I fear.”
    It was late morning when I left the bowels of the morgue and returned to the thin light of a cold winter day, much as Orpheus strode back to life, away from the underworld and his beloved Eurydice. The dead live in a place that the living cannot abide. I had visited that place, and now had to pick up again the threads of my own life.
    Sylvia recovered after many deep breaths and some mild fanning with a handkerchief, and apologized for her weakness. Bravely, she suggested we finish the morning with a visit to Mr. Wortham, so he might hear of the postmortem from us and not a stranger.
    “After what I have seen, I am not ready to converse with him,” I remember replying. We both felt, at that moment, a dawning antipathy for the man who had once been a friend, albeit not a close friend. Weren’t husbands supposed to keep their wives safe from harm?
    “We will walk for a while and get our bearings,” I suggested.
    Without planning, we found ourselves turning east, toward the Customs House and the harbor, where Dot had been found.
    Who had been there with her when she fell? Whose face had been her last vision of this life? Her husband’s? Unlike most heiresses, Dot had married for love above all other considerations. Yet yesterday, the last time we had seen her alive, the marriage seemed to have already soured. Was Preston Wortham a murderer? No. Impossible to think so. Murder required cunning, an urge to action, which lazy, good-natured Preston lacked.
    “Waldo Emerson once said to me, when a stable boy much beloved by the locals of Concord had been found guilty of burglary, that if all criminals wore their guilt like a garment the world would have no need of inquiries and investigations,” I said, thinking aloud. “Dot was seen in the morning, at breakfast, and then discovered later that afternoon. She had died—been murdered?—in full daylight, in a very busy part of Boston. How?”
    The morning fog had not lifted, and the great ships and smaller schooners of Boston Harbor rocked gently on the swells like gargantuan birds, their wings tucked under, barely visible through the drifting mist and spray. Rigging creaked; watch bells clanged; the voices of the shoremen and dockhands echoed and repeated, bouncing off that thick pea-soup fog. A laborer carrying a hogshead of rum on his shoulder as if it were no more than a five-pound sack of flour bumped into me and almost knocked me into the water, so thick was the weather.
    “There was no fog on the day Dot died,” I continued, accepting his apologies and straightening my hat. “Something else concealed the crime. What could it have been?”
    “It is bustling here, Louisa,” Sylvia complained. “I can barely hear you.”
    “Of course. There was a distraction of some sort,” I said. “Thank you, Sylvia.”
    “You are welcome, I’m sure,” she said, only a little confused.
    The heavy,