Another glance at me then, before his face smoothed out and he put the bottle down. “What about your child who died? Were you alone with her as well when she passed? A regular angel of death, aren’t you, passing the little ones those drops.”
“That is one outrageous claim—and a terrible thing to say to a mother!” My voice was not so calm anymore. “All mothers give a few drops to keep the children calm! Your first wife did it too, I’m sure.” I crossed my arms over my chest so he would not see how my hands shivered with fury. All of me felt hard and stiff; my jaw ached, ached and burned.
“Not as frequent and not so much.” That ugly sneer was back on his face.
“Yet when her children died you didn’t accuse her!” I heard my own teeth gnash together in my mouth; I had no control of it. My vision swam with black spots. It took all I had to restrain myself—but I had sworn it would not be as before.
I had told James that my enterprise was over.
Peter did not answer, just kept carving the meat.
“Small children are such fragile things; you never know what will break them.” I forced my voice to be calm and even; it shivered only a little.
I would let him send Swanhild away, I thought, and when she was out of the house, he would forget all about it, every suspicion and every angry thought. All could be as it used to be before, happy and good between us.
I should have learned by then that what is broken rarely mends.
30.
The coroner, Dr. Bowell, and Mr. Oberreich sat before me in my dining room, with only the polished table between us. Oberreich was the stenographer and sat there with his little machine. Dr. Bowell asked the questions.
I sat in one of the straight-backed chairs, facing their stern expressions. They meant to have me feel like a child, but I was not new to any of this. I had sat in that same chair in other locations talking to other men like them. After Mads died, of course, and after the Alma Street fire as well. Insurance men and lawyers, coroners and priests—they all set out to make you feel small.
“What is your name?” Bowell asked.
“Bella Gunness.” That question was easy. Oberreich’s fingers clicked on the keys.
“How long have you lived here, Mrs. Gunness?”
“We moved here in November 1900.”
“You lived here alone with the children at first, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Peter came to join us at the end of March.”
“And you married then?” Bowell did not look at me but kept his gaze glued to his notes.
“I married him on April first. He came down on Saturday night and we were married on Monday.”
“How long did you know Peter Gunness?”
“I got to know him in Chicago the year of the world fair, and then later, when I kept a store in Chicago, he came back and stayed for some time. He worked there.”
“Worked in your store?”
“No, he worked down at the stockyards.” A sweat broke out on my forehead; my corset was too tight. I kept remembering all of James Lee’s warnings and cursed my own poor temper. Nothing to do for it now, though, but to see the inquiry through. I knew our neighbors on McClung Road had said nothing but good things about me. I was a mother and a recent widow and surely these men would not take this any further.
“Was he a good man? Did you get along?” Dr. Bowell finally looked at me while he stuffed his pipe and lit a match.
“He was a very nice man.” My voice mellowed. “I wouldn’t have married him if he wasn’t. I didn’t just want a good man for myself but a nice father for my children as well. I never heard him say a wrong word to anyone.”
“So . . . when did he die?” His eyes were back on the notes.
“What time in the night, you mean?”
“Yes, it was a Tuesday morning, wasn’t it? Early in the morning, after midnight?”
“I can’t tell you the exact time, I think I was too shocked to notice, and we never paid much attention to the time.”
“All right.” He made a note. “What were you doing Monday afternoon?”
“I was finishing up some work—”
“And what did he do?”
“He was working as well. He went into town to get supplies and when he came back he helped me out.”
“What did you do on Monday night, then?”
“After I put the children to bed, Peter ground some meat for me. Then I made sausage while he was in the parlor writing letters. I was in the kitchen at the time. I washed up everything and finished up for the next day, and he was looking at some papers when I joined him. I think it was right after eleven. We were sitting there and I said to him that it probably was time to go to bed. He thought so too, and picked up his pipe and went into the kitchen. He always locked the doors before we went upstairs, and I heard him make some little noise out there. He always put his shoes at the back of the range to warm them, and I guess he must have tried to get hold of a pair, because he had only slippers on his feet. Suddenly, I heard a terrible noise. I dropped the papers and went to look . . .
“When I came out in the kitchen, he was rising from the floor with both hands pressed to his head, and I noticed there was water on the floorboards . . . I had a big bowl of brine on the back of the range, meant to go on some headcheese. The bowl was full and hot when I left it, and I saw that it had tumbled to the floor.” I could see it all as I went along. See it so clearly in my mind, what just might have happened that night. “‘Oh Bella,’ he said, ‘I burned myself so terribly.’ I was so scared by then, I didn’t know what to do. All his clothes were wet and I told him to take them off . . . I remember he said that his head burned, and I knew that baking soda and water is good for putting on burns, so I set to mix that up. I bathed a towel in it and put it on his neck.”
“Was all the brine spilled?” Even though I was sniffling in my chair and dabbed at my eyes with my handkerchief, Bowell seemed deeply unmoved by my plight.
“Yes, I think the bowl was nearly empty. It was a common crockery bowl to put milk in.”
“Was it boiling-hot?”
“It had stood for some time, so it wasn’t that hot—but warm enough to burn for sure. I rubbed him with Vaseline and liniment after I had put on the baking soda. I was very distraught. I didn’t know what to do to help him.”
“When you were rubbing on that Vaseline, did you see the cut in his head?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Was it bleeding?”
“Not very much. The bleeding seemed to have stopped.”
“Did he have a nosebleed?”
“No. I didn’t notice anything with the nose; I saw the cut on his head and asked him two or three times what happened.” I could see the doctor’s lips tighten. It was clearly a foolish thing of me to claim not to have seen the nose.
“What did he do next?”
“Well, we were just sitting there.” What did Bowell want from me?