All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred six)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Eight

Things Relative

(part two hundred six)

“Now there’s the treasure of a secretary, Mr. Ebrach. Put your affairs in right order. If the city could only afford such help for the police.” Monaghan bent to put hands on Phelan’s briefcase, and rose with a paper folder.

Phelan cleared his throat.

“I shall ask her if she’ll look at them, and if she won’t, sir, no harm.”

“I will,” Élucide said. “But what are they?”

“Thousands of words need not be said, as the adage has it. Photographs, of the poor deceased.”

“Mr. Monaghan, what is your purpose?” Ebrach asked.

“To address…or to illustrate, perhaps, though the notion is somewhat vulgar,” Phelan answered, “the irregularity.”

Monaghan slipped a finger inside the folder, and raised eyebrows at Élucide.

“I can touch them, can’t I? Then won’t it be easier if I just leaf through them myself?”

The men, other than Phelan, scooted out chairs, and semicircled at her back. The first photo gave a wide view, the steps, the graininess of poor lighting, the body. If anything surprised in this, it was only that the body seemed a bundle. The black and white made spotting the grey limbs a moment’s study.

She leafed. A close shot, next, of the head area, the visible parts odd, not at once recognizable. The fallen woman was canted, almost seated on an invisible chair, her neck against her spine, while not suggesting the angle of a break. A shawl around her shoulders sagged, gathered under her chin and nose in what looked a suffocating way.

She had nothing in her hand, lying draped at the hip, the other unseen. Nothing lay on the floor; nothing, then, appeared to have been carried by her, on leaving her cabin.

“Did she use a walking stick?”

“She possessed one. She used it, by Miss Zucker’s account, to reach things over to herself. The shawl, for one. When she walked at all, it was with the aid of Miss Zucker and Mr. Demrose. The next photo, I think, shows the foot.”

The foot was the right one, and Regina lay on her right. The left was in the condition Élucide remembered, flat-arched, puffed by edema at the ankle. Pushed by the step it rested on, shot under a lamp (the rim curving into a corner), the right foot had a horrid sore, a great ulcer, a hole through the skin, at the hollow of the arch above the heel.

There was some stuff surrounding the wound, that showed glossy under the light.

“That is not discharge. It is ointment,” said Monaghan.

Élucide, detecting the curl to her lip, sobered her face. “She had no stick with her. And, could she have walked on that foot…?”

“Not for the pain, stick or no, so the doctor thinks.”

218

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred seven)

(2025, Stephanie Foster)