Good thing Bellevue was walking distance; it saved him five cents twice a day. As he walked under the El on First Avenue, the train rumbled by and the ground shuddered. He passed a grocery with exorbitant prices in the window. Fifty-seven cents for a dozen eggs? He shook his head. A few buildings had scrawny war gardens peeping out from their back lots, growing poorly in the city soil.
Soon, Bellevue and its stately buildings loomed before him. Glossy ivy covered the brick facades and Corinthian columns. Beneath the greenery, the ivy’s wiry brown fingers insinuated themselves over whole buildings—clawing and clinging. He walked along the iron fence for a block before entering the arched gateway leading to the cobbled main courtyard. An old, giant elm tree stood guard over the incoming sick who were unloaded from the ambulances. Metal balconies jutted out from the main building, the old Almshouse, with its galleries running all the way around the courtyard. Occasionally, on clear days, Ringling Brothers would bring their circus to entertain the sick, who would watch from those balconies. But for now, the tuberculous slept quietly there on their cots, wrapped in blankets and breathing the unsullied morning air.
Jasper jogged up the curving stairs and tipped his head to a heavyset guard in the entranceway. “Morning, David.”
“Hello, Jasper! Working on a Sunday?”
“Don’t I always?” Jasper pulled a piece of wrapped candy from his pocket, a “Hooverite” of chocolate and corn syrup. Expensive, but worth every penny. David was a good old scout with a terrible sweet tooth. “Any news?”
David scooped up the candy, licking his lips. “They’re going to post some new positions in two weeks. Better salary, for sure. I’ll give you the scoop before they go up.”
Jasper touched his cap. “Much obliged.” He bounded up the interior steps and past the admitting office. To his left, one of the wards was sedate but busy enough. White-clad nurses carried trays that tinkled with the sounds of metal and glass. A sour scent, urine mixed with carbolic acid and old wood, issued from the wards. Rows of iron beds stood next to one another, the sick lying limply beneath the sheets. Jasper didn’t look too closely.
After signing in at the office down the hallway, he exited the building and wound around the courtyard to the pathology building. Most people in the city knew it better as the city morgue and were ignorant of the living, breathing people within the brick walls—the doctors and chemists trying to tease out the what, the when, and the how of why the hospital patients were sick elsewhere on campus.
The pathology building was classic McKim, Mead & White (Lord, what odd bits of information he remembered from his Fifth Avenue days!), with white trim and fine windows. In a small ground-floor closet, he hung his mackinaw on a peg and replaced it with a stained cloth coat. Finally, he grabbed his lowly weapons—dust rags, a bucket filled with clean water and soap, and a sturdy mop stained deep gray from the endless dirt. He took down a circlet of keys and attached it to his belt.
Jasper hauled his equipment from lab to office, office to lab, dusting and mopping as he went. It wasn’t long before he arrived at the double doors of the morgue.
It was quiet inside. Today, there would be no visitor tours, no entertaining of curious citizens with the macabre normalcy within those walls. Inside the clouded windows were the dead of New York who came after the heart attacks and dramatic falls off the Brooklyn Bridge. And the quieter passings too—the tiny still babies that emerged from their mothers never to issue that abrupt cry announcing themselves; the ancient, arthritic elderly who had forgotten to wake up in the morning. The metal drawers full of corpses, called the bureau, resided here.
Jasper didn’t mind cleaning the morgue. When he first started working here, he had feared that he would be tainted afterward, polluted by the effluvia. But a job was a job, and the dead were dead. They couldn’t hurt him, but they might help.
He twisted the key carefully in the lock. The room was long and spare. In the locked theater next door, there would be all the instruments for autopsy covered under clean linens, on rolling tables against the wall. The sinks against the walls were empty. Several metal tables stood in a row in the middle of the room, four of them holding bodies beneath white sheets. A ledger lay open to record the newest occupants.
On the nearest table, a thin, elegant hand drooped from under a sheet. The nails were curved and perfectly filed, and even from here he could see the half-moons at the nail bed. A few strands of strawberry-blonde hair had escaped as well.
Florence. It had to be. His heart thumped. He could almost hear her neck cracking on the stairs as she fell, though he hadn’t witnessed the accident. Without thinking, he walked over to the table and stared at her hand, now stiffened from rigor mortis. The scent of perfume rose from her hair, and with it, the unmistakable odor of bitter almonds.
Jasper knew what he would see if he lifted the sheet. He’d seen it well enough when he’d found his parents in the bedroom that Sunday morning. Like Florence, they too were found mottled with a bluish-purple coloring—starved of oxygen in the telltale way that cyanide strangled its victims, one red blood cell at a time.
Jasper had always wondered—was it still murder if you murdered yourself?
He lifted the sheet, holding his breath.
They had taken down Florence’s fancy hairdo, and the orangey-blonde waves rippled in a halo around her head. She was naked beneath the sheet, her jewelry and underthings removed. He blinked away the image of the nighttime morgue technician unceremoniously yanking off her rings and undergarments. It was degrading and utterly dehumanizing to be as bare as the next dead person, who likely lacked the grander lineage that the Waxworths possessed. So this was what happened when life chewed you up and spat you to the curb.
“What are you waiting for? An introduction?”
Jasper dropped the sheet and whirled around.
A dark-suited man stood in the door, frowning. His salt-and-pepper goatee came to a perfect point below his chin and thick, bushy eyebrows passed judgment. He was one of those men who exuded intimidation, a gift Jasper himself wished to own. When Jasper continued to stand openmouthed and frozen next to Florence’s body, the man cocked his head.
“You could kiss her, but I promise you, she won’t wake up.”
Jasper finally found his voice. “I apologize, Dr. Norris. I was just . . . I was cleaning and . . .”
“I understand. You’re curious. You’ve been working here for about two years and still curious. That’s a good sign.”
“Of what, sir?”
“Of giving a damn.”
Jasper shut his mouth. He was surprised that Dr. Norris had even noticed him cleaning the garbage bins. But those dark, piercing eyes seemed to observe beyond the obvious.
“I see you have an interest in dead, pretty girls.”
“Oh. No sir! I’m sorry, it’s just that . . .” He turned back to the table and gazed at the flowing strawberry-blonde hair. Words formed and died on his lips.
“Ah. You knew this young lady?”