“And now, as a man, what is it that you hope to find?”
Osgood was considering this question quite seriously when he was interrupted with the entrance of his bookkeeper. The young woman, whose pretty face was tightly framed with raven hair, bowed her head to both men as if to acknowledge her interruption was bold. She walked over to the desk with a light but confident stride and whispered a few words.
Osgood listened attentively before turning apologetically to his guest. “Mr. Leypoldt, would you be kind enough to excuse me? I'm afraid something has arisen and I will need to continue this interview another time.” After the reporter had departed from the room, Osgood, twirling his pen between his forefinger and thumb, said to himself, “A policeman is here?”
His bookkeeper Rebecca Sand spoke quietly as if they might be overheard. “Yes, Mr. Osgood. The officer wishes a private word with a partner, and Mr. Fields is still out. He wouldn't say what it is about.”
Osgood nodded. “Show him in, then, Miss Sand.”
“Mr. Osgood, I wasn't clear,” Rebecca said. “The officer said that he'd wait outside.”
Osgood, gripping the back of his neck with one hand, thought that strange. He also saw a doubt in Rebecca's usually stoic face, but he could not stop to think about it now. James Osgood always was ready to move ahead to the next problem.
The policeman was standing outside the street entrance by the peanut vendor, who took the opportunity to complain about a band of street musicians who had been driving away his customers with solicitations for money. Osgood presented himself.
“Are you that one?” said the policeman.
“Pardon, Officer?” replied Osgood.
“That Osgood up there?” the officer asked, squinting at the shingle rising over the entrance to the three-story building at 124 Tremont Street: FIELDS, OSGOOD & CO.
“Yes, sir,” Osgood said. “James Ripley Osgood.”
“Never mind all that,” the policeman shook his head sternly. “Ripley and what-you-will. I suppose I expected a partner of your firm to be a somewhat, now then… a gentleman somewhat…” He was trying to find the most sensitive and yet deliberate word. “Somewhat older, perhaps!”
James Osgood, a trimly fitted man not yet thirty-five and not yet looking thirty, even with a well-shaped shadow mustache, was accustomed to this. He smiled generously and handed the officer a book. “Please accept this token, Officer Carlton. One of the finest from our presses last year.”
The firm's senior partner, J. T. Fields, had taught Osgood that no matter what the circumstances, presenting a book as a gift-a rather inexpensive gesture for a publisher-improved the mood of the gloomiest recipient. Regardless of the volume, the book was weighed, its title leaf examined with pleasant surprise, and the object finally fancied as precisely right for the recipient's interests. Accordingly, Carl-ton weighed the book that Osgood handed him and studied the title. A Journey in Brazil, by Professor and Mrs. Agassiz.
“I have spoken to my wife more than once on how I would enjoy Brazil!” the officer exclaimed. Then, with an astonished gaze, looked up and said, “Sir, how is it you know my name?”
“You called upon our firm some years ago for a minor problem.”
“Yes, yes. But do you say we met?”
“We did, Officer Carlton.”
“Well,” the policeman said definitively, “you must have changed how you wear your mustache.”
In fact, Osgood had not changed a hair since he was twenty, but he agreed wholeheartedly with the speculation before asking what had brought the officer to their firm.
“It is not my desire to startle anyone, Mr. Osgood,” the policeman said, reclaiming a grim demeanor. “I asked you to come down because I did not wish to frighten that girl-I mean the very young lady only steps from your office door.”
“I think you will find that Miss Rebecca Sand does not frighten easily,” Osgood said.
“That so? Bless her! I esteem that sort of fortitude of character, even in a woman. I only hope you prove just as strong hearted.”
THE YOUNG PUBLISHER climbed into the back of a carriage while the policeman ordered his driver to the dead house.
It was impossible not to feel possessed of heightened caution when entering the halls of the city coroner's chambers of Boston. Upon their arrival, the officer led Osgood through an anteroom with little air and a dusty half window. Ascending a narrow staircase to a dark room on the floor above, the police officer turned up a lamp and looked down impatiently at his shoes, as though it were Osgood's turn now to guide them.
“We don't have the entire day, I'm afraid, Mr. Osgood.”
Then he noticed. Officer Carlton was not looking at his shoes, but at the floor.
Osgood stumbled backward as though about to fall, for the floor below them was made entirely of glass. Below it was a tiny room, twenty feet square, containing four stone slabs. On one, a woman whose skin was shriveled and blackened by cholera. Another displayed an old man whose face was burned on one side, and a third, a bloated victim of drowning. Beside each stone was a hook with the clothing the dead had been in when found. Onto each body, a gentle stream of water flowed from a series of pipes.
“It's new. This is where dead bodies not yet identified are kept for viewing, at least for forty-eight hours before being placed in a pauper's grave if no one claims them,” Carlton explained. “The water keeps the bodies fresh.”
The fourth slab. The body was covered below the neck by a white sheet. A familiar heavy suit on the hook at its side was ripped at the left sleeve. Osgood took off his hat and clutched it against his heart when he saw the dulled eyes staring back up at him.
“You know the young man then?” Officer Carlton asked at the publisher's reaction.
He was so distorted by death Osgood had to force himself to recognize him. Checking the catch in his throat and looking up at the policeman with misty eyes, Osgood lowered himself on one knee and touched the cold glass below. “He is one of my employees. His name is Daniel; he's a junior clerk at our publishing firm. Seventeen years old.”
Osgood did not know how to maintain his usual poise. It was Osgood who had hired Daniel as a shop boy three years earlier. He had been determined to give him a chance in spite of his unpropitious circumstances. Daniel quickly proved himself honest and dedicated-and for longer than two weeks, the usual expiration. He had risen to the post of clerk, and even Mr. Fields had soon called him Daniel (instead of that one, short for “that poor country boy you wanted to hire).
“What happened?” Osgood asked the police officer when he was able to speak again.
“Run down by an omnibus in Dock Square.”
“Did he have anything with him?” Osgood asked, trying to piece it together, make sense of anything that he could. As he kneeled, Osgood was so close to the glass that the reflection of his own face was imposed over his clerk's lifeless form.
“No, he had nothing on his person. We connected him to you because one of our patrolmen had remembered seeing him coming and going from your building. Do you know where he was today?”
“Yes, of course. He was to be receiving important papers at the harbor and delivering them to our vaults.” Osgood hesitated but remembered he was speaking to a police officer, not a rival publisher. “They were the advance sheets of the next installments of The Mystery of Edwin Drood sent from London.”
The Dickens novel had been published in serialized installments at the beginning of each month. As with his other novels, the serial publication would gradually add readers who would then praise the story to friends and relatives who had not read it. The serial format made readers feel present at the very moments the story unfolded, as if they were among its characters. After the publication of the final monthly installment, the novel would be published in its entirety in book form.