The Dante Club Page 0,71

in life and career, I'm afraid. I would have thrown that note out with the other rubbish, but not you. So tell me. What should we do that we haven't?"

Rey smiled gratefully.

"There must be something. Come, come."

"You won't like what I say, Chief," Rey responded.

Kurtz shrugged. "As long as it's not more of your damned scraps of paper."

Rey generally refused favors, but there was something for which he longed. He walked to the window framing the trees outside the station and looked out. "There's a danger we can't see out there, Chief, that someone who was brought into our station house felt more strongly than his own life. I want to know who died on our courtyard."

* * *

Oliver Wendell Holmes was happy to have a task suited to him. He was neither entomologist nor naturalist and was interested in the scientific study of animals only insofar as it revealed more about humans' inner workings, and more specifically his own. But within two days of Lowell's dropping off the hodgepodge of crushed insects and maggots, Dr. Holmes had assembled every book on insects he could find from Boston's best scientific libraries and began extensive studies.

In the meantime, Lowell arranged a meeting with the Healeys' maid, Nell, at her sister's home on the outskirts of Cambridge. She told him what it had been like to find Chief Justice Healey, how he had seemed to want to talk and could only gurgle before he died. She had fallen to her knees at the sound of Healey's voice, as though touched by some divine power, and crawled away.

As for the discovery at Talbot's church, the Dante Club had decided that the police must uncover for themselves the money buried in the vault. Holmes and Lowell were both against this: Holmes from fear and Lowell from a sense of possessiveness. Longfellow urged his friends not to view the police as rivals, even though knowledge of their activities by the police would be perilous. They were all working toward one end: stopping the murders. Only, the Dante Club was working primarily with what they could find literarily and the police with what they could find physically. So after reburying the pouch with its invaluable one thousand dollars, Longfellow had composed a simple note addressed to the office of the chief of police: Dig deeper... They hoped someone at the police station with a keen eye would see it and understand just enough, and perhaps discover something more of the murder.

When Holmes had finished his study of the insects, Longfellow, Fields, and Lowell met at his house. Though Holmes could see all guests to 21 Charles Street arrive through the window of his study, he liked the formality of having his Irish maid settle visitors in the little reception room and then carry up a name to him. Holmes would then scamper down the stairs.

"Longfellow? Fields? Lowell? Are you here? Come up, come up! Let me show you what I have been at work on."

The exquisite study was more orderly than most authors' rooms, with books stretching from floor to ceiling, many - considering Holmes's height - accessible only by the sliding ladder he had built. Holmes showed them his latest contrivance - a reaching bookcase at the corner of his desk so that one did not have to stand to retrieve something.

"Very good, Holmes," said Lowell, who was looking toward the microscopes.

Holmes prepared a slide. "Up to the time of the living generation, nature had kept over all her inner workshops the forbidding inscription NO ADMITTANCE. If any prying observer ventured to spy into the mysteries of her glands and canals and fluids, she covered up her work in blinding mists and bewildering halos, like the deities of old."

He explained that the specimens were maggot-producing blowflies, just as Barnicoat, the city coroner, had pronounced the day the body was discovered. This type of fly lays its eggs on dead tissue. The eggs then became maggots that eat the decomposing flesh, nourishing themselves into flies and beginning the cycle again.

Fields, rocking in one of Holmes's chairs, said, "But Healey cried out before he died, according to that maid. That means he was still alive! Though I suppose only barely hanging to a thread of life. Four days after he was attacked... and he was filled with maggots in every crevice of his body."

Holmes would have been revolted at the thought of such suffering had the idea not been so fantastic. He shook his head. "Fortunately for