“What are you, lady, some kind of doctor?” the attendant asked, giving Malloy a questioning glance.
“I’m a trained nurse,” she informed him. A nurse who had seen death many times and witnessed dying far too often. She turned to Malloy. “What does the coroner think killed her?”
“He don’t know,” the attendant replied, obviously taking great pleasure in knowing more than either of them. “There ain’t a mark on her anyplace.”
“Well, something made her stop breathing against her will,” Sarah said impatiently. “Maybe she was poisoned.”
“You know of a poison makes people stop breathing like that?” he replied in challenge.
Sarah supposed there could be, but she wasn’t exactly an expert on poisons. She turned to Malloy, who was looking even more annoyed than he had before. “Could I examine her myself? Maybe I can find something they missed.”
“They ain’t done an autopsy yet,” the attendant said with a small smirk, “but if you think you can save ’em the trouble, go ahead.” With a flick of his wrist, he jerked the sheet off the body, leaving the poor girl lying there naked and completely exposed.
“You ghoul!” Sarah shouted in outrage, but Malloy was faster. He slammed the attendant against the wall.
“You jackass!” Malloy was saying, his forearm pressed against the fellow’s throat in a very threatening way. “Haynes will hear about this. Now get out of here, before I put you on one of these slabs.”
The attendant had undergone a complete transformation. Stricken with terror over what Malloy might do to him, he’d suddenly found his manners. “I… I’m sorry, ma’am,” he stammered when Malloy released him and gave him a shove toward the door. “I didn’t mean no harm. Please don’t say nothing to Doc Haynes,” he added as he backed out of the room.
Sarah was too busy gathering up the sheet and spreading it over Emilia again to respond. Malloy made a move, as if to go after the fellow, and he scampered away, slamming the door behind him.
“I’m sorry for that,” Malloy said when he was gone. “This kind of work… Well, the best people don’t choose a job like this.”
Sarah could imagine. “This poor girl had little enough dignity in life. I hate the thought of that… that creature looking at her now.”
“He won’t be looking at anything around here anymore. I’ll see to that.”
She looked up from arranging the sheet and gave Malloy a grateful smile. “Do you think it would be all right if I examined her?”
“You don’t have to. Haynes will be doing an autopsy, like that idiot said. He’ll figure it out.”
Sarah sighed. “It’s just… I feel responsible somehow.”
“Because she was wearing your clothes?” he asked with a frown.
“I don’t know why. I just do. Please, I’ll only need a minute.”
He sighed in resignation. “Take as long as you need.” He walked to the other side of the room and sat down in the attendant’s chair. She noticed he carefully turned his back, giving the girl some privacy even in death, and she smiled at his consideration.
Without really knowing what she was doing, Sarah carefully examined every inch of Emilia’s body. Except for more of the red marks on her arm and hip and knee, from where the blood had pooled when she’d been lying dead in the park, she found nothing unusual. Covering her with the sheet again, she called, “Malloy, could you help me turn her over?”
He wasn’t happy about it, but he did, lifting the slight girl as if she’d been a straw dummy and placing her gently on her stomach. “You’re wasting your time,” he said as she pulled the sheet down to check the skin of the girl’s back. “Haynes will probably find out she had some disease and just picked this morning to drop dead.”
“She didn’t look sick when I saw her,” Sarah argued.
The girl’s hair had come undone and was in a hopeless tangle around her shoulders, bits of dead leaves clinging to it. From this angle, Sarah realized with a start why Malloy had thought Sarah’s was the dead body lying in the park. Emilia’s hair was almost the same color as hers.
A wave of pity washed over her, bringing tears to her eyes. She wanted to go back in time. She wanted to change things so that Emilia would still be alive, a young girl full of hope, perhaps for the first time in her life.
Tenderly, she touched the tangle of golden hair in a feeble attempt to smooth it. She found a stray hairpin and pulled it out. As if of their own accord, her fingers began searching for others, combing through the silken locks and pulling out the bits of leaf and dead grass, the way she would have if it had been her own hair.
When she’d done what she could, she twisted the mass back into the semblance of a bun and began securing it with the pins she’d salvaged. She didn’t realize she was crying until a tear dropped onto Emilia’s shoulder, but she didn’t bother to wipe her eyes until she’d finished with her futile task.
Only when Emilia’s hair was tidy again – or as tidy as it could be under the circumstances, did Sarah reach for the handkerchief that all well-bred ladies carried tucked into their sleeves. Emilia’s image blurred, but Sarah resolutely blotted away her tears, until she could see the girl clearly again.
“You can leave her for Dr. Haynes now,” Malloy said quietly, gently. She couldn’t remember ever hearing that tone in his voice. She wanted to look up and see the expression on his face, but something else had caught her attention.
“What’s that?” she asked of no one in particular, leaning down to peer more closely at the hollow on the back of the girl’s neck that was now exposed.
“What’s what?” Malloy asked, but she didn’t answer. She was tracing the small mark with her finger.
“Look, there’s a little dried blood here,” she said, pointing at a spot just at the base of the girl’s skull, where her hair almost hid it.
Malloy examined the spot she’d found. He wasn’t impressed. “You don’t die from a scratch on the neck.”
“It’s more than a scratch,” she insisted. “It looks as if someone stuck something in there. See, the skin closed over it because the wound is so small.”
He looked again. “Could a wound like that kill someone?”
Sarah tried to remember her anatomy classes, and what she remembered alarmed her. “The brain is just inches from this spot. If the knife or whatever it was went straight in, it would sever the spinal cord. If it went upward at an angle, it would plunge right into the brain.”
Malloy still wasn’t convinced. “I thought you said she suffocated.”
“I said she stopped breathing against her will. We don’t know much about how the brain works, but we do know that injuries to it can stop various bodily functions.”
“Like breathing?”
“Like breathing,” she confirmed.
Malloy stepped back from the table, thumbs hooked into his vest pockets, and considered her theory. “Wouldn’t there have been a lot of blood?”
Sarah couldn’t imagine they’d missed blood on the girl’s clothing when they’d removed it. “Where are her things?” she asked, looking around.
Malloy found them under the table, in a sack. Sarah removed each item carefully, trying not to remember that some of these things had touched her own body so recently. She didn’t recognize the shoes and the undergarments. They would have belonged to Emilia. Then she pulled out the jacket of the suit she’d bought at Lord & Taylor just a few short months ago. They’d been having a sale, and she’d been pleased to improve her wardrobe for the reasonable sum of seven dollars. Carefully, hating the very feel of the fabric, she turned the jacket and examined the neckline. She saw no trace of blood.
“I don’t see anything, but a deep puncture wound probably wouldn’t have bled very much,” she said, handing it to Malloy and reaching into the bag for something else. She pulled out the hat she’d worn for so long that she’d stopped noticing it. Malloy had called it ugly, and indeed it was. She tried to imagine anyone being pleased to receive such a worn and shabby thing or wearing it proudly, as Emilia must have done. The thought was too painful to bear.