Page 57 of The Business of Blood
“That’s assuming she’s deserving of justice,” he muttered.
“What do you mean? Do you know something about her?”
“No, nothing.” He shook his head adamantly, and the wan afternoon light glinted off a small patch of thinning hair on the back of his pate that was usually covered by his hat.
The whims of nature and time.
“I’m merely posing the question. What if St. Peter is, in fact, not up there tracking your sins for judgment day? What if vengeance doesn’t belong to the Lord, as the good book claims, but to us? Does that make life more precious, or less? Does it alter the significance of existence?”
I wasn’t sure. “It certainly makes death seem more tragic.”
“Does it?” Setting his speculum down, he scratched at the back of his head as though my gaze had caused an itch. “Depends on the death, I suppose.”
Didn’t it just?
“We need to find out if Katherine Riley had a child,” Croft announced from beneath the arch of the bedroom door. He brandished a small baby bottle with a rubber feeding tube and two tiny, hand-stitched booties. “If so, it’s been taken.”
Dr. Phillips made a speculative sound. “Impossible to tell just now, Inspector,” he said ominously. “Her womb has been taken, as well.”
13
Even I was allowed to join in the search for the missing child. We tore the place apart—the attic, the basement, the roof, the window wells. The pathetic garden out back. For all our efforts, we uncovered a worn baby blanket, a wooden rattle, and a few other tiny garments. One a little boy’s jumper, and the other seemed to be a christening dress.
The search fanned out after that.
Neighbors reported that they’d heard a baby in Ms. Riley’s home, but not regularly. They’d assumed she tended a child, or perhaps that she had grandchildren close by.
For as close as residents seemed to be in such crowded neighborhoods, no one knew much about Katherine Riley. She was pleasant, kind, and kept mostly to herself.
Maybe she was part of what my father used to call “the forgotten ones.” The lonesome aging sort with no one to shoulder their filial duties. Often isolated and neglected, especially in these communities of the underfunded and the overworked.
My father used to look after these people in our neighborhood. He was forever sending my brothers on shopping errands, or conscripting them to lift trunks, move furniture, or take our leftovers to Widow So-and-So.
Even I’d learned advanced reading at a three o’clock appointment every Wednesday with a mostly blind and completely childless septuagenarian professor named Donegal O’Dowd. My father had called him a “confirmed bachelor,” but now that I thought about it, he might have shared a few tendencies with Oscar Wilde.
And I didn’t mean their affinity for poetry.
I’d been inconsolable when poor Mr. O’Dowd passed on when I was sixteen. I still owned a book of Shakespearean sonnets he’d lent me. It was one of my most carefully guarded treasures, and yet I’d never taken the time to truly read it.
Strange, how you forgot to think about those people until moments like this.
I hoped Professor O’Dowd wasn’t lonely anymore…wherever he was.
Croft now paced behind the orderlies, who carried the remains of Katherine Riley out the narrow door. I won’t tell you what they to keep her contents from spilling. Needless to say, they stepped lightly and most certainly dreaded being jostled by the crowd.
“Where are you off to?” I asked Croft, aware he’d become like a hounden pointe. He had a colorful paper clutched in his fist, and I would stake my life that he considered it a lead.
“Thatis no business of yours.”
Inspired, I plucked the paper out of his hand.
It was an advertisement for a recent fundraiser for unwed mothers, unfortunate children, and orphans held at a local diocese some three weeks prior. Katherine Riley had been one of the patrons and organizers of the event.
Just wonderful. I tracked the stretcher draped with its white sheet as they loaded it into the coroner’s cart and pulled away with a sharp crack of the reins. She’d been a saint with a soft spot for women and children in desperate situations. What a bloody shame.
What a terrible loss.
Croft snatched the flier back. “It seems we both have work to do.” Plunking his hat low on his head, he squared his shoulders in preparation to part the gathering throng. “Good afternoon, Miss Mahoney.” With those words, he shoved into the crowd, which seemed to part for him as the Red Sea had for Moses.
