me you’re sweet on him. You had that look in your eyes the other day, but I thought it was just a passing fancy.” She shook her head. “If it’s true what they’re saying, then you ought to stay far away from him, from this whole mess.”
“I’m not sweet on him.” She bristled. Brushing aside her friend’s concern, she forced herself to ask the terrible question. “How...how did it happen?”
Pressing her lips together, Mary-Ruth looked as if she wasn’t going to answer. After a moment of strained silence, she finally said, “She was strangled and stabbed. Repeatedly.”
Tabby winced at the brutality of the truth, but it did not change the fact that she couldn’t rest until she’d seen Miss Hammond for herself. “I just need to see her.”
“See her! Tabs, why on earth would you want to do that?”
“I just... I need to. Please?”
Mary-Ruth looked uncomfortable, but she also looked tired, and Tabby pushed aside her guilt as she realized her friend hadn’t the heart to argue. “Very well, but she...that is, it was a violent death. I could only do so much.”
Tabby knew what Mary-Ruth was trying to tell her, but the shells that the dead left behind held no dread for Tabby, not after she had seen such horrors in her mind’s eye since she was a small child. “I understand.”
With a reluctant nod, Mary-Ruth led her down the narrow hall.
The room where Rose Hammond’s body lay was cold and still as a mausoleum. A lone table stood in the center, a gauzy shroud draped over the motionless form. With the moonlight spilling in from the small street-level windows, the whole scene looked as if it was carved from marble.
“I’ll dress her tomorrow,” Mary-Ruth said quietly. “The poor thing has had enough for tonight.”
“May I have a moment with her?”
Mary-Ruth’s dark brows drew together in question, but she nodded. “I suppose a cup of hot tea might be nice. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
The door clicked shut behind Mary-Ruth, leaving Tabby alone with only the sound of her breathing and the pressing heaviness of the room. The eucalyptus and lavender that Mary-Ruth had placed around the table mingled with the scent of bleach and lime. Taking a deep breath, Tabby closed her mind, and slowly approached the shrouded figure.
Gently, as if it were as fragile as a spider’s web, she took up the corners of the shroud between her fingertips. A horse cart rumbled past on the street outside, the vibrations causing the shroud to quiver slightly. Just as she was about to pull it aside, she stayed her hands. She shouldn’t be here. She had wanted to do penance for kissing the young woman’s fiancée, and had hoped that seeing Miss Hammond would somehow convince her of Mr. Bishop’s innocence. But now that she was here, she felt only guiltier than ever; she was a voyeur, and nothing more.
Her heart beat loud in her ears, and she could hear herself swallowing. The air grew heavier, like the building quiet before a storm. Suddenly Tabby didn’t want to be anywhere near Rose Hammond’s corpse or the too-thin shroud covering it. This had been a mistake.
She was just turning to leave when the smallest of noises stopped her. It was like the soft rustling of a curtain caught in a breeze, the predawn beating of a swallow’s wing. But there was no breeze in the room, no birds, only Tabby and the corpse.
Though the hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end and her stomach had turned to lead, Tabby forced herself to turn slowly back around.
She had built up her wall. She had taken care to keep her mind closed. Yet it had mattered not one drop. The words took shape on Miss Hammond’s veiled lips before Tabby heard them, hoarse and so quiet that she could not tell if they came from the corpse, or from inside her own head.
Help me.
8
IN WHICH AN ARREST IS MADE.
IT RAINED THE day of Rose Hammond’s funeral, and everyone in attendance agreed that it was only appropriate that the heavens should weep for the loss of such a lovely young woman struck down in her prime. Tabby, who had witnessed more than her fair share of burials, might have told them that it was only superstitious nonsense, except that it did seem somehow fitting, as if the universe recognized the sorrow, the guilt, and the apprehension in Tabby’s heart.
She had not gone to the funeral service