Cold Path Page 8

  “Yeah, or anything else that could be used as a lever.”

  “Hmm … let’s see.”

  While she perused the available tools, he crouched alongside the coffin to study the seal more closely.

  The door to the room creaked open. A black woman wearing a hooded sweatshirt under a janitorial uniform slipped into the room. Her hood was pulled up over her head and she glided soundlessly in her protective booties.

  “We’re just about to start working in here,” Eliza explained over her shoulder. “Would it be possible for you to come back and clean this room later?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m afraid not,” the woman drawled in a honey-thick southern accent. She pulled the door shut behind her and lowered her hood.

  “Davina?” Bodhi peered at her.

  Eliza spun around. “The archaeologist?”

  The question was directed to Bodhi, but Davina answered.

  “Yeah, it’s me.” She darted across the room. “I know I shouldn’t be here, but I had to come.”

  Bodhi understood the impulse. “Davina, this is Dr. Eliza Rollins. She’s the parish coroner for Saint Mary’s Parish in Belle Rue, Louisiana. She has considerable expertise in unusual methods of preserving bodies. So she graciously agreed to lend me a hand.”

  Davina and Eliza shook hands.

  “Sorry about the gloves. And congratulations—what a remarkable find.”

  “Thanks.” Davina beamed. Then she began to bounce lightly on the balls of her feet, dispelling nervous energy.

  “How did you manage to get into the building?” Bodhi wondered.

  “I have a cousin on the cleaning crew. She sneaked me in with the staff this morning, but I heard Sully’s here roaming around. So I won’t be able to stay long. I just wanted to watch you work for a bit and be helpful if I can.” She made circles in the air with her hand in a let’s hurry this along gesture.

  “Your timing’s impeccable. We were about to crack open the coffin, but maybe you know how to open it without damaging it?”

  She gave the coffin a dubious frown, and then asked, “Do I need to put gloves on?”

  “Better safe than sorry,” Eliza chirped, pulling another package of gloves from her tote. She tossed the bag to Davina, who snagged it out of the air.

  Davina wiggled first her left, and then her right, hand into the gloves, and then stepped between them to approach the coffin with a confident air. She squinted as she examined the seal around the lid. After a moment, she reached out and rubbed one gloved finger along the seal.

  “Probably sealed with molten lead, possibly mixed with some sort of liquid or sand,” she mused.

  “What’s our play?” Bodhi asked.

  She turned a quarter-turn and motioned to the tools. “Could one of you hand me that crowbar?”

  “So that is the best way to get into it,” Eliza remarked as she hefted the pry bar and passed it to Davina.

  The professor shrugged. “It’s the easiest way to get into it.” She bounced the bar against her palm, adjusting to its weight. “I’ll use a light hand and try to minimize the damage, but it’s an unfortunate reality that sometimes you have to break a few eggs in the process of making a historically significant omelet.” She hesitated. “May I?”

  “Of course. After all, it was your discovery.” Bodhi gestured toward the coffin, and then he and Eliza stepped back to give her room to maneuver.

  She slipped the bar under the top lip of the coffin and wiggled it back and forth until she’d breached the seal. Then she braced her legs and pried, levering up the lid. The tendons in her neck popped out from the strain, but after a long moment, physics prevailed. With a loud, slow, creaking sound, the left side of the lid rose from the base. The movement was almost imperceptible. But it happened. She created a gap. She scooted around to the other side of the coffin and repeated the process.

  “It’s loose,” she said at last.

  Bodhi and Eliza leaned over the table. Davina frowned. “The light’s not great. Bodhi, there should be a flashlight over there. Will you shine it in the little gap for me, please?”

  “Sure.” He picked up a slim penlight from the equipment table and did as she asked.

  She crouched and peered through the slit as she worked the bar. “A little to the right, and higher.”

  He repositioned the beam. “How’s that?”

  “That’s good.” She squinted inside for another moment, and then returned to standing and shifted to face Bodhi and Eliza. “In addition to the sealant, it looks as though a series of springs or clips spaced about nine or ten inches apart keeps the lid in place. I’m going to work on one and see if I can trigger it to release rather than just prying the lid off with force. It may take a while, okay?”

  “Okay. Do you need help?”

  “Nope.” She flashed a grin.

  When she turned back to the coffin, he caught Eliza’s eye. He lowered his voice. “Do me a favor and help me name her.”

  “Name who?”

  “Her. The woman in the coffin.”

  Her eyes lit with understanding and her face fell. “I’m sorry. I forgot how you feel about words like ’specimen,’ ’corpse,’ and ’body.’ Sure, let’s name her.”

  “I was thinking Cassiopeia?”

  Her eyebrows scrunched together. “Like the queen?”

  “I was thinking the constellation. But I’m pretty sure that was named for the queen, so yes, like the queen.”

  “Sure. Cassiopeia. We can call her Cassie for short.”

  His flittering thoughts settled on the name. Cassie.

  “Perfect. I propose we do a visual inspection examination of Cassie only. If we determine she died recently, we’ll autopsy her. But if we believe she might date back, we’ll give Dexter a preliminary report without slicing her open and recommend he find an expert to document her condition and to attend any autopsy.”

  “I agree that’s the right course, but we’re only here until Monday. Whatever expert they bring in might end up doing it after we leave. Are you okay with the chance we’ll miss out on the opportunity?” she asked.

  “I am. I’d rather miss out than risk destroying history.”

  “Me, too, honestly.”

  “Good. Then we have a plan.”

  “I’m in,” Davina called. “I’ll need some help easing this lid off.”

  They raced across the room and stood on either side of her.

  “We need to lift it up and off Cassie gently. If we bump or jostle her, it could affect her integrity,” Bodhi warned.

  “Cassie?” Davina asked.

  “We’re calling her Cassiopeia, Cassie for short. Bodhi doesn’t like to work on unnamed bodies. He wants to remember the humanity of the dead,” Eliza explained.

  “Okay, Cassie it is.” Davina shrugged. “We’ll lift it on three and put it down to the left of the coffin. It’s going to be heavy.”

  Bodhi nodded. The iron coffin plus the weight of its occupant would be at least three hundred pounds. He estimated the lid alone could weigh seventy-five or more.

  He placed his gloved fingers under the edge of the lid and curled them up, then waited for Davina and Eliza to do the same.

  “On your count,” he told the professor.

  “One. Two. Three, lift!”

  They raised the lid straight up about six inches, moved horizontally to the left, and eased it down onto the metal table with a muted clatter.

  They gazed down at Cassie. Without the barrier of the thick, discolored glass, she looked . . . deader. The watery glass had softened the effects of death. But up close, her flesh was gray, mottled, and lifeless.

  Bodhi’d seen several hundred dead bodies over the course of his career. He knew this woman was dead—whether she been dead for a century and a half or for a day and a half. And yet, she’d appeared like a princess under a spell in a fairy tale when he’d viewed her through the box at his elbow. He shook his head at himself.

  Eliza gave him a curious look. “Are y
ou okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Focus.

  He turned back to the table. Davina was fingering the neck of Cassie’s blouse with reverence.

  He pulled aside the stained and dirty cloth of the high-collared white cotton blouse Cassie wore. Eliza reached down and rubbed the fabric between her gloved thumb and forefinger.

  “Even through the gloves, I can tell this isn’t a blend. There are no manmade fibers,” Eliza murmured.

  Davina’s head snapped toward her. “That indicates she’s probably wearing period clothing.”

  Eliza shrugged. “Maybe. It’s rare but not unheard of for a blouse to be one-hundred-percent cotton or linen.”

  “We’ll have to see if there’s a tag. That’ll help date the dress. Although the style suggests it’s not current. Who wears a blouse that buttons way up her neck like that?” Davina pointed toward the conservative neckline as she spoke.

  Bodhi unbuttoned the row of tiny mother-of pearl-buttons as gently as he could. Even so, several of the buttons crumbled in his hands. The fabric fell aside.

  They stared down at Cassie’s exposed neck. Eliza’s sharp intake of breath corresponded with a tightening in Bodhi’s chest.

  Davina must have felt the shift in the room. “What are we looking at? What am I missing?”

  “Well, to answer your question of who would wear a blouse like this, I’d say someone whose been dressed by an undertaker or relative hoping to hide the fact that she’d been hanged.”

  “Hanged? How can you tell?”

  Bodhi pointed a deep furrow that crossed Cassie’s neck on a diagonal. “Do you see this groove running from under her right ear, down to her neck on the left? That’s classic noose patterning.”

  “The rope would have been knotted on her right side. That’s why the marks are deeper down here on the left and shallow up here under her right ear,” Eliza added.

  “She was … murdered?” Davina blinked.

  “She was hanged,” Bodhi cautioned. “It could have been suicide.”

  “Or it could have been a lynching,” Davina shot back.

  Eliza made a small questioning noise in her throat.

  Davina met her eyes. “You’re going to say that you thought lynchings only happened to black people, right?”

  “Well, yes, I was.”

  “You’d be right, especially in the South, especially right after the Civil War. Lynchings were common, and they were overwhelmingly committed by white mobs against black men. But during Reconstruction, scalawags—white Southern Republicans—and Northern whites who were sympathetic or helpful to the Freedmen were sometimes harassed, assaulted, and lynched as a warning to other ’race traitors.’ It didn’t happen often, but it happened.”

  “Would something like that have been reported? I mean, by the newspapers?” Bodhi asked.

  “I wonder . . . I have a friend who’s a librarian at the Bell Archives. He’d know if there’s any record of a white woman being lynched around here. Maybe she was one of the teachers from up North who came to work with the Freedman’s Bureau.”

  “Back up a second. There’s an archive dedicated to the sharecropper? Did he have a lot of papers?”

  “Not Jonah. His cousin’s son, Isaiah Matthew Bell. Isaiah Bell was Alabama’s first black congressman, and he worked with the Freedman’s Bureau to set up schools for newly emancipated slaves. He eventually grew disheartened with the lack of progress and moved to Ireland or Wales or somewhere overseas. Like I said, I’ll ask Micah. What else can you tell about how she died?”

  Bodhi glanced at Eliza, who shook her head.

  “What?” Davina demanded.

  “An autopsy would show whether she suffered a laryngohyoid fracture, but we really need to get some DNA analysts involved. Now that we know that Cassie may have been murdered, we shouldn’t continue to examine her. We might introduce trace contaminants,” she explained.

  “And we need to move fast. We don’t know what effect being exposed to the air will have on a corpse this old or any DNA that’s been preserved,” Bodhi added.

  “Good luck with that. There won’t be any forensic DNA specialists,” Davina said in a resigned tone.

  “Why wouldn’t there be? The case calls for it.”

  Davina paced between the table and the corner. “Don’t you get it? They were willing to bring in an expert to prove me wrong. But to confirm that someone murdered a white woman and buried her on Jonah Bell’s farm? No chance. They wanted a big splashy archaeological find, but this is not what they had in mind. The Rutherford Family is allergic to scandal. They’ll bury Cassie—no pun intended—and me along with her, to keep a lid on the news.”

  “She may have committed suicide,” Eliza reminded her.

  “How’s that better? They want a story that’s all sunshine and rainbows, not one that’s all death and devastation. Unless you leave out the part about how she died. Can you just tell him that you’ve confirmed she’s from the 1800s? Then, maybe, maybe, you’ll get your experts.”

  Davina’s distress was painted all over her face, and it rolled off her in waves. Bodhi allowed it to wash over him, but he couldn’t permit it to change his course of action.

  He brought the truth to light. It’s what he did. He would have to tell Chief Dexter what he and Eliza had found. Even if doing so would cause Davina pain.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t do that. The truth has to come out. But we’ll try to get Dexter to understand how important your discovery is. And the Rutherford Foundation, too.”

  She opened her mouth—whether to argue or concede, he’d never know.

  14

  Marvin’s voice, overly loud for some reason, drifted down the hall and stopped outside the lab room. He fumbled with the door for a long moment, then opened it slowly and noisily. By the time Marvin entered the room accompanied by a thin man in a suit, Davina had yanked her hoodie over her head, plucked a feather duster from the pocket of her janitorial uniform, and was brushing it over a bookcase in the far corner, her back angled toward the door.

  “Doctor Rollins, Doctor King, this here is Mr. Eugene Sullivan. He’s the Director of the Rutherford Family Foundation.”

  Bodhi thought he heard Davina mutter “deputy director” from the corner, but a glance in her direction revealed nothing.

  “Hello,” Eliza said.

  “Mr. Sullivan.” Bodhi nodded.

  Eugene Sullivan stepped out from behind Marvin and strode toward them, his hand outstretched and a wide grin splitting his face. “Please, call me Sully. Everyone does. And Marvin’s somewhat overstated my position. I’m the deputy director. Grandmother retains the reins even at her age.”

  Eliza peeled off her gloves and offered her hand and a greeting. Bodhi followed suit.

  Sullivan strolled forward and rubbed his hands together like a kid anticipating a birthday gift. “So, I took the liberty of looking you two up. Very impressive pedigrees. How lucky for us that two experts like you just fell into our lap.”

  “You’re luckier than you know, Mr. . . . er, Sully. It turns out that Professor Jones was right. It’s our preliminary opinion that the body and the coffin date to the same period. It’s an extraordinary find.”

  Bodhi watched the man’s face as he delivered the news. His mouth formed a small ’o’ of surprise and his eyes widened. He leaned over the dead woman. “She’s really been dead for a hundred and fifty years? Incredible.”

  Eliza plucked at his sleeve and gently pulled him back. “Please don’t disturb her. Her value isn’t simply historic. It’s also forensic.”

  Sullivan dragged his eyes away from Cassie to fix Eliza with a confused frown. “What do mean, forensic value?”

  Eliza glanced at Bodhi. ’You’re up.’

  “Just as Professor Jones’ theory about the age of the corpse was correct, Chief Dexter’s theory that she was a victim of foul play may also be correct.”

  Sullivan shook his head. “I don’t understand. You think this woman was murdered?
”

  Bodhi used a pen to move aside the unbuttoned collar and pointed out the furrow left behind by the rope. “Yes. She was hanged.”

  “Hanged?”

  In the corner, Davina was muttering again. Marvin cast a curious look in her direction, but she kept her head down and continued to run the duster over the bookcase. For a moment, Bodhi didn’t think Sullivan had noticed her at all, but his nostrils flared and he beckoned Marvin with one finger.

  “Tell the cleaner to come back later.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Marvin’s tone was perfectly neutral. A shade too neutral. But Sullivan didn’t notice, and Marvin crossed the room and whispered in Davina’s ear. She nodded, and Marvin piloted her out of the room, positioning himself between her and Sullivan as he did so.

  Bodhi suppressed a smile and answered Sullivan’s incredulous question. “Yes, hanged. Possibly lynched, given the time period.”

  Davina paused in the doorway to hear Sullivan’s response, and Marvin obliged her by fumbling with the door again.

  “Lynched,” Sullivan snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous. This woman is white.”

  Bodhi and Eliza exchanged glances. She cleared her throat and jumped in, trying a different tack.

  “It’s also possible the hanging was accidental or … a suicide. We’ll have a better sense of the specifics once DNA experts get involved. If there was a mob behind her death, there might be multiple DNA sources preserved on her body—"

  He cut Eliza off with an imperious flick of his hand. “DNA experts? Absolutely not. The last thing we want is to undertake such an expense only to highlight the nature—pardon me, the alleged nature—of this woman’s death. The notion that we would agree to broadcast this ludicrous theory is laughable.”

  Bodhi didn’t much feel like laughing. But Davina snorted as she crossed the threshold and stepped into the hallway. Sullivan’s head snapped up, but Marvin yanked the door closed behind him.

  Bodhi stared at the man. “I guess we’ll have to see how Chief Dexter wants to handle it.”

  “I guess we will.” Sullivan’s smile was thin and unconvincing.