“What done her in?” Mr. Foggerty begged the question they all wondered.
“It’s too soon to tell.” Joel’s answer for her father caused her to give him a questioning raise of her eyebrow. He had no right. No medical expertise.
But, one might argue, neither did she.
“No one knows who she is?” Joel’s voice sent vibrations through Ivy’s body. She edged away from him.
“None of us, anyway.” The sheriff shrugged. “I’ll start to investigate her. Maybe she’s from a surrounding farm or part of a gypsy group passing through, what with the circus down south and all.”
Dr. Thorpe grunted. Ivy saw what her father saw. The bruises on the body. Her wrists, her forearms, her neck. They told a frightening tale of abuse, whether long-term or suffered at the time of her death, they wouldn’t know until they moved the body to the clinic. Ivy wrapped her arms around her torso, not from cold and certainly not from being squeamish. This had not been an accident. The girl had suffered and it seemed she had suffered alone, with no one to hear her cries and no one to care that she had gone missing. Already, in the early spring chill and the gray mist that rolled from the forest to the base of the tree, the girl was a mystery at risk of being lost for eternity.
Ivy squeezed the cloth over the porcelain washbasin. The drips from the rag into the water were the only sounds in the room. She draped the damp cloth over the edge of the bowl. It was ready to minister to the poor young woman who appeared shy of twenty years of age.
“Now?” Ivy met her father’s eyes. He gave a short nod.
She reached for the top button of the girl’s dress and paused. Fine cheekbones, pale in the pasty white of death, light blond brows, lips in the shape of a perfect rosebud minus color . . . she was beautiful. Even in death. It was moments like these that tugged at Ivy’s empathy, even though Oakwood thought she was half crazy. Had the girl’s last breaths been frantic, filled with terror and panic? Or had she passed in her sleep, and someone disposed of her body in a bewildered state of grief?
Ivy grimaced as she spread open the girl’s threadbare garment. Not with the bruising. There was nothing peaceful in this death. Distinct markings curled around the base of her throat, and Ivy touched them with her fingertips as she raised her eyes to meet her father’s.
“Strangulation?” Ivy murmured. The horror of suffocation stuck too close to another death that haunted her daily. An accidental one, but accidents never diminished trauma.
Her father pushed his spectacles up his nose and bent over to eye the markings. “Most likely.” He folded the dead girl’s dress off her shoulder to reveal more of her skin. “She’s also been manhandled. We definitely need further examination.”
Ivy ached for the girl in a way she couldn’t explain to anyone. It wasn’t sadness, it wasn’t even grief. It was a throbbing fury for what this young woman endured. This was why Ivy wrote the stories of the dead in her journal. Oakwood residents called her the “memory keeper” and referred to her book as her “death journal.” They formed the assumption that Ivy had developed a morbid fascination with death since Andrew. What the citizens of Oakwood didn’t understand was that no one, ever, deserved to be forgotten, and Ivy would do everything possible to preserve their stories beyond a factual obituary in the newspaper.
She smoothed away a lock of hair that lay across the girl’s forehead. Ivy’s eyes narrowed in focused determination. No one should die nameless.
“Ivy.”
Dr. Thorpe’s mouth was hidden by his full, white mustache. The wrinkles around his eyes were gentle, but her father’s stern expression told her she needed to continue. Ivy was thankful he didn’t have pity in his eyes. He understood what many didn’t. She saw Andrew in every person who struggled and passed away in spite of her father’s meticulous and caring practice. She saw Andrew in the face of the unremembered girl in front of her. Ivy fingered the empty locket that dangled around her own neck. Andrew had given it to her, and one day she would fill it with something precious. Something that promised life had a beginning, instead of an unending line of passages into eternity.
Ivy chose to ignore her thoughts. They would only distract her and take her to places in her grief that would result in nothing good. She pulled the tail of a stained ribbon that held the scooped neckline of the deceased’s chemise together. More bruising peeked from beneath the soiled cotton, just above the girl’s breasts. Fury mingled with Ivy’s impassioned need to find justice for this victim. She unbuttoned a tiny white button on the chemise that rested between the young woman’s cleavage.
“Stop.”
Dr. Thorpe leaned forward to examine a small mole.
“It’s not dirt,” Ivy observed, and her father nodded. Turning, he made a note of the potential identifier in his medical journal.
“Keep going.” He motioned with his hand.
She did.
Ivy admired her father’s hidden talent of postmortem examination. It wasn’t something all doctors were schooled in, but with newer medical practices coming to the fore, her father wasn’t one to be surpassed by the younger doctors. On occasion, a medical examination needed to be completed, and Oakwood boasted of a practitioner who was more than capable. Her father’s immersion into the medical world after Andrew died was even more wholehearted than when Andrew was alive.
The clearing of a throat jerked both Ivy and her father from their intensive examination. Joel Cunningham lounged in the doorway, overflowing with the self-confidence Ivy so easily remembered. That confidence had once attracted her as a young woman of fourteen. She waited for his look of discrimination at the sight of a lady assisting with a postmortem medical examination. There was none. He looked beyond her. Ivy squelched the sting of being passed over.
“What have we found?”
Joel stepped into the room. He was all business, wasn’t he? Ivy narrowed her eyes. Thank goodness her father wouldn’t answer Joel. Just because he had been at the site of the body’s discovery didn’t mean they owed him any explanations.
“It appears she may have died of strangulation.”
Well then. Maybe she was wrong.
Joel approached the table, and Ivy yanked the sheet over the young woman’s body. Indecent. The man had no propriety. He most definitely had not improved with age.
She gave him a hasty glance. Well, his personality hadn’t improved with age. His lean form hinted at a chest that had matured from a young man’s lanky frame into strength and breadth. The tailored suit coat he wore suggested he’d stepped up in the world from the orphan he once was. Why was he home in Oakwood? And why was her father handing over information as if Joel Cunningham was working for the sheriff?
“Anything you can tell about how she died might help with my investigation. The sheriff has engaged my assistance with this case, as his detective.”