I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths of the cool sea air, trying to block out the horrible knowledge filling my head. The briny scent of the sea helped me to swallow some of the acid on my tongue. I forced myself to listen to the cries of the seabirds and the waves lapping at the shore. But when I heard Gage shift impatiently behind me I turned back, aware that our time was running out.
Grateful for the leather covering of my riding gloves, I reached out to unfasten the top half of the buttons on Miss Wallace’s dress and her chemise. Peeling back the edges, I found another bruise and the greenish discoloration on the skin of her abdomen I had been looking for.
“I can tell you she’s been dead for longer than twenty-four hours.”
“You’re certain?”
I nodded, buttoning her back up. “Sir Anthony used to say that he knew he’d gotten a fresh body when the skin of the abdomen had yet to turn green. Although then he often had to contend with the rigor of the corpse.” I lifted the hand, showing him how the fingers bent. “This body has gone past rigor and is returning to pliancy.”
I had hated the “fresh” bodies he made me sketch while he dissected them even more than the others, particularly when I began to realize that many of them weren’t criminals come straight from the gallows. I had felt an uneasy suspicion that my husband, or rather the grave robbers I knew he must have employed, had gotten them by even more nefarious means than their normal scheme of digging up newly buried corpses. When it came to the procurement of the cadavers my late husband used, I had not wanted to know the details. I would not have been able to bear knowing, not without a shadow of a doubt, not when there was almost nothing I could have done about it. My supposed active participation in that process had been one of the most macabre and vicious rumors about me. I was said to have lured young men into being the victims on Sir Anthony’s dissection table.
Gage knew all this, for I had admitted it to him during our investigation at Gairloch, so he didn’t ask now, and I was grateful.
I pushed up the sleeve of the ratty brown coat to look for more bruising and also found the distinctive marks of the spring-loaded lancet used in bloodletting at the inside of her elbow. “She’s been bled. And recently.”
Gage examined her other arm. “From this arm, too.”
One of the images drawn on William’s wall suddenly flashed before my eyes. The one of the man with rivulets of what looked to be water running down his arms. I now felt more certain than ever that they were supposed to be blood.
I re-covered her arm and laid it gently beside her body, considering all of the evidence. “I don’t think she drowned. An autopsy could tell us more. If there’s water in her lungs. But I don’t think we’ll find any.”
He rounded the body and offered me his hand to help me stand. “How did she die, then?”
“I don’t know. She was clearly mishandled and abused, restrained, and almost certainly bled.” I stared down at the girl’s pale face. “Surely the wounds made from a bloodletting done before she went missing would have healed before she died around a day, a day and a half ago.”
“All of those things could still have happened to her, and she still could have drowned,” he pointed out, but I could tell he agreed with my original conclusion.
“Yes, but that still means her body was moved here. The only way she could have drowned and washed ashore here is if the killer chased her into the firth along this stretch of beach and either knocked her unconscious or held her head underwater.” I found my gaze straying toward Banbogle Castle and a chill crept down my spine. “But I rode along this stretch of shore just yesterday afternoon,” I reminded myself as much as Gage. “I would have seen her.”
“Maybe, maybe not, depending on how fast you rode by here and how much attention you were paying to your surroundings.”
I had been so hurt and angry. All I remembered were my riotous emotions and the wind in my face as I urged Dewdrop onward. The thought that I might have ridden past Miss Wallace’s body in the shallows near the shore without noticing made me sick to my stomach. If only I hadn’t let my temper get the best of me maybe I would have been more observant, and better able to say for certain whether or not the body had been in the water just offshore.
“But if it’s any consolation,” Gage told me, correctly reading my horrified expression, “I think you’re correct. Whoever killed her brought her here deliberately to make it look like a drowning. Or, possibly, something worse.”
I was about to ask him if he meant what I thought he did when the sound of approaching horses made me turn back toward the trail. Two horses had emerged from the forest and I was surprised to see Miss Remmington on one of them. She ordered the stable hand to help her down and began striding across the distance between us.
“Is that her?” she yelled.
I looked at Gage in alarm and we moved forward to intercept her.
“Is that her?” she demanded, her voice rising almost hysterically. Her hair was streaming down her back and her eyes were wild.
“Please, Miss Remmington, let’s not . . .”