Pamela Meyer

DEATH IN MINIATURE

“Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.”

― Frances Glessner Lee, Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

Chapter 1: Once Upon a Hardscrabble Farm

(Monday, June 25, 1906)

The morgue-wagon horse nickered behind her as she took a deep breath, the expansion of her lungs challenging the restraint of her corset. And with her fine shoes muddied on this warm morning, Frances stepped over the threshold of the weathered old barn. The eerily floating body of the farmer materialized as her eyes adjusted to the dim and the thin rope of the noose came into focus. Although this was not her first dead body, it was the first one she had seen in situ. Underneath the farmer, a glowing beam of sunrise pierced through the back window, illuminating Detective William Leeson, a man of thirty. Squatting with his flashlight, peering through the wooden slats of a trunk-sized broken crate under the body, he examined the floor intently—very intently.

What has he found? Perhaps an insect. Good!

The stages of development of certain insects could indicate the time of death. Or the location where a body might have been and whether it had been moved. And these can lead to identification and finding the actual scene of the crime. Sweet apple carts, how she wished to be the one doing the investigating, to be judged of value to Leeson’s team.

This very second, Frances stood merely a heartbeat away from obtaining her dream job as a pathologist, deep in the thick of helping the police solve crimes justly—if she could impress the man currently mesmerized by the floor right in front of her.

Shaking off her thoughts, she turned to making observations. Neatly piled hay to one side, orderly storage of tools. The noose, rigged up from the barn’s hay hoist, an overturned pail nearby. As for the trunk-sized crate, its top slats broke inward, the farmer’s feet dangling inside as if it collapsed under his weight. But it did not look right.

“Good morning, Detective Leeson. Circumstances notwithstanding, it is a pleasure to meet you.” Her voice resonated through the dust-speckled, hay-scented space sounding too much like her twenty-eight-year-old, untested, self. “Dr. McTash and Mr. Potter arranged for me to—”

“Mm,” Leeson grunted and, without averting his eyes, waved her closer.

Crossing the barn floor, she joined him under the suspended body, carefully placing a knee down across from him, the crate and dangling legs of the dead man between them. All the while, she ensured that her ankle-length skirt did not catch and her position remained that nearly impossible combination of appropriate lady-like comportment and functionality. A glance to the floor through the slats.

“That is peculiar,” she puzzled.

He lifted his eyes to hers… Deep and brown…Keen and all-encompassing.

“Water from the pail?” she offered. “He dumped it out to stand on it?”

“Mm. Very good. But then why the crate?”

“It does seem cumbersome to use for suicide,” she said. “And if he accidentally fell through the slats, breaking them when he stood on it, he could have gained purchase on the edges to save himself. And I agree, considering the pail, why use two makeshift stools for the deed?”

He gave her a nod and called across to Potter at the door. “Mr. Potter, have you sufficiently observed the location of this crate to allow us to move it?”

On the ride out from Boston this morning, her potential boss, Mr. Potter, had described the detective as ‘uncommonly focused and succinct.’ The graying and chubby-cheeked lawyer by trade had encouraged her to relax and be herself. However, his description of Leeson as a ‘hard-to-please genius, one of those Sherlock-Holmes types’ served less in relaxing her than it did in rousing butterflies. She suspected that Leeson, like other men, would not regard her seriously. Even if Potter accepted her as the Medical Examiner’s new intern for his morgue, whatever she could accomplish in bringing medical science to the process of criminal investigation would be significantly hampered, without Leeson’s backing.

“That’s fine, Detective,” Potter replied.

Frances helped dislodge the farmer’s legs, finding them stiff as boards. “Could you lift him? I can remove the crate.”

“Mind the puddle,” he coached.

The obvious instruction annoyed her. Despite her best intentions, she retorted in kind. “Be careful not to sever the splintered wood, Detective,” she said, stifling a laugh at his petulant expression. “You can see the wood broke against the grain, as would be expected with a force great enough to snap the tough cellulose fibers. But the break is not centered underneath him, instead more to the side, giving way at the weaker point, here, at the knot. An uncentered break suggests the board had not been pre-sawed.”

“Mm,” his only reply before he returned them to the puddle. “It was hot last night. The barn door remained open, according to the farmhand who discovered Mr. Wallace here.”

“I see. If he had dumped the pail to use it, the water would have evaporated after so much time.” Her eyes traveled up the boots, legs, and torso to the face of the man hanging between them. The telltale grimace revealed the first tick of death’s clock—small facial muscles begin contracting two hours after death, earlier in this heat.

Leeson leaned around the legs and followed her to observe the same. Certainly, he would not appreciate a lecture from her on using rigor to estimate time of death. She pressed her lips into a tight smile.

“And there’s the inside of the bucket,” he said. “Coated with dried bran flakes, last used for a bran mash, probably for the horse in the back.”

A detail I would have noticed that others do not. “It has long been an axiom of mine that the little—”

“The little things are infinitely the most important.”

“Ahh, a fellow reader of Doyle’s Holmes, I see, Detective.”

The moment grew uncomfortable, and both peered back down at the puddle.

He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a handkerchief.

Stylish—she thought, taking in the look of him in. Seriously Frances, stop appraising the man and focus on the clues. Yet, her efforts at self-restraint failed as she cocked her head and studied him in the less-common Ascot cap with his longer black curls cascading out from under it and his three-piece tweed suit. Such a tailor-altered suit would likely cost a police detective half his annual salary. She appreciated his genteel manner of dress, her own polished clothing standing out less severely than she had worried it would.

Their gaze met again before the detective folded his handkerchief and adjusted his stance, balancing and dabbing it down into the puddle.

At the sight of his soiled handkerchief, she laughed. “I do hope you are not planning to offer that to some weeping damsel in distress, Detective.”

His blank stare back at her bordered on complaint.

Typical of a man. This one quite stiff at that. She had received more than enough dismissive looks from men in her lifetime. A glance to the body hanging in a state of complete rigor mortis. TWO rather stiff men here this morning. She hurried a silent apology to Eben Wallace. Working alongside her fellow male students in the medical school’s autopsy lab had hardened her. Telling jokes became her instinctive means to deter them from seeing her as a yellow-bellied, softhearted female. The first time the class stood around a real corpse and the professor sliced open the reeking flesh, two men fainted dead away. Expecting her to follow, all eyes rushed to see her fall. ‘And they are not even wearing corsets,’ she had said. Laughter ricocheted all around. There and then, she was in.

Twisting around the farmer’s legs, she considered the wet spot on the detective’s otherwise pristine handkerchief. “Perhaps he micturated?”

“Micturated?”

“Urinated,” she blurted, thinking he did not know the term.

“I understand what micturition is, I just—” He huffed. “The technical term. It suggests medical training. Have you medical training, Miss Warden?”

Arrogant. Belittling… What does he think—I am just some rich dilettante? “NURSE. NURSE Warden, Detective,” she corrected, unable to soften her irritation. “I graduated from nursing school in Atlanta.”

Both stood.

“Nurse Warden,” he said. “While I don’t look down in any way on the highly skilled profession of nursing, and contrary to what you might think, I do NOT hold that women are incapable of studying medicine, I find women to be a distraction under any professional circumstance.”

Oh, that did it. Pompous, stiff, infuriating man. She had been determined to be demure, but this man rubbed her the wrong way.

Frances stepped away from the body. Turning to face him, she squared her shoulders and placed her hands to her hips. “My medical education is beyond question,” she said, chin in the air. “Of course, as a woman, I could not earn a degree in medicine.” She shrugged, attenuating the edge out of her resentment at the fact. “The closest I got was to ‘sit-in’ on classes at medical school, all of which I completed with high accolades from my professors. It was Dr. Burgess McTash—you know him, Suffolk County’s Medical Examiner—who recommended me for the intern position at the morgue.”

“I was told only that you were a young woman of wealth who had an interest in murder investigations and that McTash requested we accommodate you.”

Interest.’ That they ‘accommodate’ me. Fury crossed her arms over her chest. She had been fascinated with the intersection of sudden death investigation and medicine since her teens, and the closer she got to discovering what had happened to cost someone their life, the more she longed to be part of this world from which women were barred. Her hopes of pursuing a medical degree had been dashed by her father’s refusal to allow her to attend college, whereas he expected and encouraged her brother to do so. Still, she had found a way.

“With some convincing, my father finally permitted my education—provided it be at his alma mater, and with Dr. McTash, as my brother’s close friend, entrusted to be my chaperone here in Boston—he agreed to bestow Harvard Medical School with annual grants.”

“Harvard Medical School?”

“Yes!” she replied, managing not to stomp her foot at his male condescension.

“This is distracting me.”

“Oh, I am sorry, Detective.”

“Detective. Nurse Warden,” Potter called from the barn door, hurrying over. “Dr. McTash and I welcomed today’s crime scene as an opportunity to see Nurse Warden at work.” His gaze settled on Leeson. “I apologize for any inconveniences. Now, if you’re finished here, Detective, I’d like to guide Nurse Warden through assessing the crime scene.”

Botheration!” Leeson grumbled, his jaw clamped tight.

Might chip a tooth if he is not careful.

“Detective, McTash did insist,” Potter said. “I know it’s rather unconventional—”

“The woman is a distraction.”

Dagnabbit—precisely what Frances did not want. Her breath held, worry and satisfied fury warring inside her. Leeson let out a sigh—Frances followed.

“Here,” Leeson said, thrusting the sullied handkerchief in Potter’s direction. “Could you analyze whatever this is from the puddle? No odor of ammonia… it turns out. Maybe it’s best you take a sample yourself… a proper sample.”

A surreptitious smile crossed her lips as Leeson retreated to the doorway, a momentary diversion. She returned her attention back to Potter and her heart jumped.

“Mr. Potter, wait!” she said with authority. Lifting a paper bag from the medical case, she softened. “Items such as blood and urine must be collected in a paper bag to allow ventilation, thus preventing condensation and mold growth which would spoil the sample.” With Leeson watching them from the periphery, she and Potter stepped to the body, and she collected a ‘proper’ sample from the puddle in a vial. ‘Contrary to what you might think, I do NOT hold that women are incapable of studying medicine,’ my *#$%— Frances halted the inner rant. In front of her the older Potter, his gut squeezed in, and chest stuck out, looked into her eyes too long for her liking. Darn it. Even this self-confessed happily married man, and would-be mentor, was tempted to flirtation.

Potter leaned closer, offering an avuncular smile. “Now, Nurse Warden,” he said, his voice louder, showing off in Leeson’s audience. “When considering rigor mortis, I’d say he’s been dead about ten to twelve hours. You see the stiffness has completely taken his legs.”

“Yes. But might I suggest the importance of the effect of the high temperature, overnight as well as this morning. It will have sped up the process.”

“Ah yes. An important consideration,” he gave, adjusting his calculations. “So more likely eight to ten hours.”

“Oh, and Potter,” Leeson called from the door. “Preserve the knot in the noose when you cut him down.”

“The knot?” Potter asked.

“Indeed, Detective,” Frances called across, then tipped to Potter. “There is much one can learn from a knot about the person who tied it. For instance, there are many types of knots. Some knots not everyone can make—”

Potter interjected, “As a sailor would make a specialized sailor’s knot, or whatnot—?”

“I would think this knot.” Mischief tugged at her face.

“Oh, what knot,” Potter said, shaking his head with a laugh, seconds behind. “I see.”

“Sometimes they just pop out.”

“I’m one who appreciates the humor, Nurse Warden. Anything to brighten investigating the demise of the dead.”

“On that, we concur, sir. Now, as to the noose, there is one other thing. Consider the knot’s skew. See how it tilts off to the side—"

“Moose Muffins! It indicates whether he was right or left-handed. How insightful!”

Still frowning, the corner of Leeson’s mouth twitched, and her heart leaped. She had thought she had botched it, but perhaps not, perhaps not.

Chapter 2: Looking Deeper

Leeson placed his hands in his trouser pockets and looked around the barn. It would be a while until Potter and Nurse Warden were done. Impatient with himself for being overly distracted by this anomaly of a woman, he searched for something else on which to aim his focus.

A hoof stomped to the floorboards from deeper in the barn, and Leeson remembered the horse in the back. Probably hadn’t been fed or watered with all the commotion.

He hung his suit jacket over a bridle on a hook, gathered some hay and tossed it over the stall’s Dutch door. Odd, he thought of the horse blanket hung sloppily on a blanket rack next to the stall in the middle of summer. The horse nickered.

“Aye there, Laddie. I know, I know, you must be hungry.”

It had been a long time since Leeson had cared for a horse, first as part of his childhood duties, then as a ranch hand herding cattle in the summers. It did his heart good to see the horse settling down, his long nose deep in the tangles of hay. The water bucket had been ill-treated, laying wedged, half upside-down, empty on its hook. “You’ve spilled your water. I know, just some rumpus trying to get the attention of your man over there.” Horses had taught him that you must give trust to gain trust. Thus, his voice calm and unguarded, he unlatched the door. “You’ll be missing your man. I know you will,” he eased. He retrieved the bucket, left the stall, and re-latched the door. Where would our farmer have his water pump?

He walked to the back window—the water pump visible behind the barn through it. He checked for evidence that the window had been used to access the barn, avoiding leaving prints in the mud in front. No scuffs or footprints on the windowsill, itself relatively free of dust. It slid easily to open and close. Possible. But no proof it’s been used. A last look through the window, the pretty, early-morning hues of dawn were gone.

Bucket in hand, he headed for the barn door. The long carriage ride here this morning came to mind, the sun below the horizon, the morning star, which he knew in truth to be the planet Venus, low and bright. In his usual chipper, talkative way, Sergeant Aubrey had said Potter was bringing an associate of McTash’s, reportedly a woman, to the crime scene. She’s a woman alright, Leeson chimed in silently after the thought.

He shook his head at the ridiculous notion—a woman—with no medical degree, working as an intern pathologist for the Northern Mortuary’s coroner. Complete folly! A favorite proverb of a sage Chinaman cook, from Leeson’s first lumber camp, imparted. One saying something is impossible should not interrupt the one who is doing it. Unexpectedly he reheard her voice, re-saw her face, and re-felt his heart skip a beat with her teasing him about offering his dirty handkerchief to some weeping damsel. Intimidated by her, yet fascinated with her, Leeson brought her down a peg, deriding her fancy medical terms and her lofty Harvard education. Yet, she’d received accolades from all her Harvard professors. An astonishing accomplishment, that. It couldn’t have been easy, especially for a woman. Oh yes, there was more to her than he’d initially thought.

On his way out, almost to the door, Leeson peripherally spied her reaction to his presence. Her improved posture? Abrupt inhale? His own gaze forced forward—she had his thorough attention.