“She seemed herself. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Jack sat back and folded his hands across his midsection, ready to sit through what promised to be one of Belmont’s infamous wandering explorations, designed, it seemed to Jack, to extract information by artful prodding. Within a half hour he had Heath tripping over his own tongue, admitting that he didn’t know about Mrs. Campbell’s state of mind because he hadn’t asked her, and he hadn’t asked her because, well, he said, turning a hand, palm up, what difference did it make?
After a short silence the coroner turned to Sophie. “Dr. Verhoeven, you delivered Mrs. Campbell in March, as I understand it.”
Sophie agreed that she had.
“Did you see her after she gave birth in March?”
“Yes, I called on her two days later to make sure she was healing, and then she came to see me in my office some weeks ago.”
All heads came up abruptly.
“I don’t think I had that information,” said Hawthorn. “She came to see you in your office, for what reason?”
“She asked me to examine her.”
“Aha. And what were your findings?”
“She was a healthy young woman about a month postpartum. That is, she was physically healthy, but very melancholy and even despairing.”
“As is common after any birth,” Heath interjected.
“Not to this degree,” Sophie contradicted him.
Heath gave a dismissive wave of the hand.
The coroner said, “Did she give a reason for her state of mind?”
Sophie didn’t hesitate. “She believed herself to be with child, and she was terrified about another pregnancy so soon.”
“She said that exactly?”
“No,” Sophie said. “As I remember her words, she said, ‘I just can’t have another baby so soon, it will be the end of me.’”
Jack saw no surprise or even concern on the faces around the table, and for the first time got a sense of what Anna and Sophie meant when they talked about men’s willful blindness.
“Mrs. Campbell was with child.” The coroner was asking for confirmation of what he believed to be true, but Sophie was not so easily led.
“She may have been,” she said. “But it was too early to tell by examination.”
“She had an active imagination.” Heath ignored the sharp look that Sophie sent him, and Hawthorn seemed not to notice.
He said, “Did you operate on Mrs. Campbell, Dr. Savard?”
Conrad cleared his throat.
“Pardon me,” the coroner said. “Dr. Verhoeven.”
“I did not,” Sophie said.
“Did she ask you for the name of someone who would perform an abortion?”
“She did not.”
“Did you volunteer names of such persons?”
“That is a leading question,” Conrad said. “Please rephrase, or I will instruct my client not to answer.”
“I’ll let it go for the moment. Dr. Savard, you did operate on Mrs. Campbell.”
“Yesterday,” Anna said. “Yes.”
“And previous to that?”
“I never saw Mrs. Campbell previous to her arrival at the New Amsterdam yesterday.”
“You’ve read Dr. Manderston’s report. Do you agree with his finding on the cause of death?”
Jack was glad that they had finally come to the heart of the matter. It seemed Anna was glad too, because she spoke in the calm, matter-of-fact voice she had used in her laboratory classroom. “I found Dr. Manderston’s observations to be similar to my own, but I don’t agree with his conclusion that an operation was carried out by person or persons unknown.”
Mayo leaned forward, his long nose twitching as if he had caught the scent of something interesting. “The operation was legal?”
“Don’t answer that until and unless District Attorney Mayo clarifies what he means by ‘operation,’” Belmont said.
Mayo inclined his head. “Would you say that Mrs. Campbell underwent an abortion?”
“I couldn’t say that with certainty,” Anna said. “It’s unclear to me whether she was pregnant in the first place.”
“You wouldn’t recognize pregnancy at this early stage upon opening the reproductive organs?”
“If the uterus had been intact, certainly. But the damage was extensive, and at least a day old.”
“Then let’s say it this way. Did she undergo an attempted abortion?”
Anna looked the man directly in the eye. “In my professional opinion, the procedure in question was meant to interrupt a pregnancy. If there was a pregnancy. When undertaken for that specific purpose, such operations are illegal. As you well know.”
Mayo was running a finger back and forth over the tabletop as if he had found something etched into the wood that he needed to understand. To Jack it looked like a mannerism developed to distract and disorient a witness, but he had misread Anna if he thought she was so easily unsettled.
Mayo said, “You have never performed this operation yourself?”
“Do not answer that,” Belmont said, sourly. “It’s not relevant to the case at hand.”