“Because she was smothered.”
Lowe shook his head in disbelief. “Don’t know if I’d put much stock in anything old Higginbottom tells you. He told my granddad there was nothing wrong with him a good cupping wouldn’t cure—and was still heating the damned cups when the old man keeled over dead. Charged us for the cupping too. Said it weren’t his fault the man died before he finished.”
“The bruises on Emma Chance’s face are faint, but they’re there,” said Sebastian. “She was smothered.”
Lowe reached for his bay’s lead. “Never heard of such a thing. Who’d know how to kill without leaving no sign of it?”
Someone with experience at killing, thought Sebastian. But he kept that observation to himself.
Sebastian drove next to the dilapidated farm of Dr. Hiram Higginbottom.
He found the doctor in a pen near the barn, down on his knees beside a prostrate sick cow.
“She going to be all right?” asked Sebastian as Higginbottom lumbered to his feet with a grunt.
“Who knows? Maybe God—assuming God takes an interest in sick cows. I’ll have to remember to ask the Reverend.”
Sebastian watched the doctor bend to brush the dirt from the knees of his old-fashioned breeches. “Have you finished Emma Chance’s postmortem?”
Higginbottom straightened slowly. “I have.”
“Anything interesting?”
The doctor stared at him a moment, and Sebastian suspected the man was tempted to tell him to wait for the coroner’s inquest like everyone else. Then a gleam of nasty amusement came into his watery gray eyes, and he jerked his head toward the barn. “Come. I’ll show you.”
The dilapidated lean-to was even more hot, stuffy, and fly ridden than before, and thick with the stench of death. Emma Chance lay on the crude table where Sebastian had seen her before, her remains looking oddly shrunken now beneath a stained sheet that didn’t quite cover her bare toes. Her clothes formed a jumbled pile on a nearby shelf beside several dirty, fly-covered tin bowls that held what he realized must be her internal organs.
He was aware of Higginbottom smiling at him openly now, eyes narrowed with malicious satisfaction. “Sure you’re up to this?”
“Yes.”
Higginbottom gave a disappointed grunt and shoved aside the sheet to pick up the cadaver’s right arm. All traces of rigor had gone off by now, leaving the body limp. “There’s a faint bruise here,” he said, pointing to her forearm. “Course, she could’ve done it before, somehow. But it looks to me like the imprint of a man’s thumb.”
He let go of the arm, and it slid off the edge of the table to dangle down toward the dirt floor. “Other than that, the only thing of interest is this—” He rolled the body onto its side, revealing a long, slender bare back now purple with lividity. “Probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t had a couple of the lads move the table out into the sun while I did the postmortem. But I assume with your stellar eyesight you can see what I’m talking about?”
Sebastian studied the strange pattern of faint abrasions on Emma Chance’s shoulder blades. “What are they from?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the doctor, letting the body flop back onto the table. He made no move to cover it again with the sheet.
“That’s it?” said Sebastian.
“That’s it.”
“What about her lungs and heart?”
“They look normal enough.”
“When do you think she was killed?”
“Sometime Monday, presumably. How’m I supposed to know?”
Sebastian reached to draw the sheet back over the dead woman’s naked body. “I assume you looked at the contents of her stomach?”
Higginbottom glared at him from beneath bushy gray brows. “I did. She had a fair amount of half-digested food in there. But from which meal, I’ve no idea.”
Sebastian paused with the sheet still in his hands, his gaze on Emma Chance’s pale, waxy face. Her skin had taken on the color and texture of old vellum. And he found himself wishing that he could have met and spoken with her when she was still a laughing, breathing, vital, and talented young woman.
Before she was reduced to this husk of decaying flesh.
He drew the sheet over her face and turned toward the door.
“So who do you think did it?” asked Higginbottom, following Sebastian into the yard.
“I’ve no notion.” Sebastian stood in the late-morning sunshine, his face lifted to the light as he sucked clean, fresh air into his lungs. “You’re certain she wasn’t sexually assaulted?”
Higginbottom fumbled in his pockets to come up with his pipe. “No sign of it.”
Sebastian started to turn away.
“Did find one thing might be of interest, though,” said Higginbottom.
Sebastian paused to glance back at him.
“She was still a virgin.”